Do you know of any places in the US that buck this trend?

In degrees. In my opinion, NYC, Chicago and SF are about the only cities recognisable to a European, and even then, a great many of their denizens reside in suburban settings hardly differing from 99% of Middle America (apart from costing 4x more).

Having grown up in the Midwest/Rust Belt and then moved to the southeast, I can safely say that older cities up north are more dense and have some aspects of traditional community building. The south - with its pervasive new construction and far-aflung exurbs and cookie-cutter subdivisions - seems to be the absolute worst. Not sure how things are in the middle of the country. The west seems to vary a lot.

But no, I don't really know any place in the US, apart from inner-city NYC, Chicago, SF and maybe Seattle and Portland and one or two other places, that isn't fundamentally car-dependent. Life in the vast majority of the US is quite homogenous in this regard, at a general level.

Yeah, that mirrors what I’ve found. Hoping to find something smaller than SF/NYC that’s also dense enough to be walkable. A book I read called “Happy City” mentioned streetcar suburbs (suburbs built when streetcars were dominant for commuting) as good options for walkability, but I’m not sure how to identify those without knowing cities pretty well.

Here in Chicago, half my team bikes or walks to work and the other half takes public transit. Most everyone over age 30 or 35 can scrape up enough to own a property on a rather average tech salary. Other than the intolerable weather during the month of January it really is a fantastic alternative to the coasts.

Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder. I liked Chicago when I visited (in the summer, not the infamous winter).

I'm really hoping to find a place with no cars where unsupervised kids can get run over by them, but I know that might not be possible to find in the US. Dense and walkable would be a decent consolation prize.