Apartments aren't the only dense, urban/suburban housing. Sensibly-scaled suburbs and urban neighborhoods that maintain mixed use zoning and the right density to allow walking for many or most errands/shopping and are still close enough to business centers that they're a reasonable public transit trip away at worst are a thing. Often the houses are close together, if not attached, they have no front yard as we know it (garage empties directly onto street, if there is a garage), narrow mixed car/pedestrian streets on a grid leading to larger arteries, and very small back yards. See e.g. Tokyo.

Start modifying those things—single-use zone residential areas, require minimum yard sizes (rather than, say, maximum) and setbacks from roads, pretty soon you're back to requiring cars, necessarily, because everything's too far away to walk. Which means more and wider roads. Which pushes everything farther apart.

Now you need useless "green space" to separate these wider, faster, busier roads from places where people are. Pushes everything farther apart, more driving, more cars. Parking lots that could each hold an entire 20,000-population old European city start popping up, maybe even by law, because everyone's driving and they need places to park. That pushes everything farther apart. Those parking lots and the big-box stores the service are hideous and dirty. More big buffers so the nearby neighborhoods don't turn into low-home-value ghettos.

The edge of the city is now several times farther from the center than before, and those in the center have to travel several times as long to reach the country. Public transit is now guaranteed to be awful for most of the city because there's insufficient density to make it work. As a "bonus" on top of all the wasted time and lower quality of life that stuff's causing and despite all the added greenery (mostly space to make up for being too far from parks and real human-oriented public green spaces, like lawns/yards, and gigantic grass buffers for ugly, noisy, dangerous roads and parking lots) the whole thing's far less green, in an environmental sense.

Do all that, then make all the urban schools terrible so middle class families with kids (can afford two+ cars, can't afford private school) can't (responsibly) choose to live there, and you've just invented most American cities.

As someone with a family who'd much prefer to live in the former environment, I don't feel like the suburbs and car culture are something we chose. They're the only realistic option, in most of the US—not because it must be that way, but because that's how it happens to be here. And yes, to preempt the usual retort (not to imply that you'd necessarily dredge it up, xienze, just in general) of course we could move overseas or to one of the handful of areas in the US where there are both jobs and nice (for our definition of nice) areas to live, but that's far from the only factor in choosing one's home. Doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have such limited housing/lifestyle options.

The tricky thing is you can't have both. Once you build an American-style 'burb on the edge of a city, it gets much harder to expand past that with traditional urban neighborhoods. Ring the city with American suburbs and that's all you're gonna get afterward. It's like a barrier. No such thing as free lunch, and all that. Seems like city development options are either nearby-rural+decent-urban, or distant-rural+car-only-suburbs+awful-urban.