The problem with suburbs in general, and Silicon Valley in particular, is that suburbs don't scale. This wasn't as much of a problem for previous generations, but these days Silicon Valley has grown to a point where it is. The traffic along highway 101 is terrible and is not easy to avoid. Caltrain doesn't go everywhere and the connecting buses are slow and poorly timed. The place is too sparse to get by without a car, so you absolutely have to get one.
The suburbs scale just fine. You do have to choose employment within a reasonable distance or move. You can arbitrarily extend suburbia out for hundreds of miles in every direction. Just look at almost the entire northeastern seaboard for proof of this. The only reason the suburbs can't spread quite as well in the Silicon Valley area is because there are too many mountains. Even still, there's no fundamental reason that it can't expand out in directions where it is feasible to do so.
The South Bay traffic problems would be significantly reduced if we eliminated Prop 13. Under Prop 13, a home's value is reevaluated only when the owner sells it (for the most part). As a result, homeowners who change jobs are forced to commute because selling their homes and buying otherwise identical homes closer to work would result in a huge property tax increase.
That said, for the most part, I've found 101's traffic easy to avoid. Highway 280 parallels it just a few miles away, and usually has fewer problems. And in the South Bay, 85 is frequently a better choice than either one. The only time I've been unable to avoid bad traffic on 101 is when I'm going down towards Salinas, and that stretch is only bad because A. the road desperately needs to be eight lanes all the way to Salinas, B. SR-156 needs to be widened to four lanes all the way to Castroville (greater Monterey), and C. there is no good parallel route beyond where 280 and 85 merge into 101 other than taking 17 down to Santa Cruz and going across Highway 1 (which always has serious traffic problems because it also needs to be 4+ lanes all the way to Monterey).
Also you may disagree with this, but to me it's also a much more pleasant environment - the Victorian housing, the city skyline, the parks and the waterfront along the Embarcadero and the Marina look beautiful compared to the suburban houses, office parks, shopping plazas and the freeways that connect them.
Attractiveness, perhaps, though that varies widely, depending on where you are, both in the city and in the suburbs. Functionality-wise, definitely not. In my standalone house, I can play my grand piano at 2 a.m. without the neighbors calling the police. In a multi-family dwelling, that would almost never be the case, because properly soundproofing the walls between two units dramatically increases the cost of construction. I can build a house that (assuming no HOA rules) looks like what I want it to look like, without the design decisions being limited by trying to cram square footage onto a postage stamp, resulting in hard-to-use three- and four-story buildings that use space inefficiently. There are large parks with actual trees and lakes. The schools are better (which isn't important until you have kids, but give it time). And so on.
The article is not great, but it's more based around the idea that there is a generational trend towards urban living. It's wrong to think of it as either "everyone wants to live in the suburbs" or "everyone wants to live in the city", but when compared to previous generations more of Generation Y prefers city living.
The problem with that assertion is that youth have always had a strong preference to city living. The author is suggesting that this is somehow new, but it isn't. That was true even forty or fifty years ago. On the average, that preference starts to change when people have their first kid, and people tend to strongly prefer the suburbs by the time their first kid reaches school age. I see no evidence that the pattern is changing significantly, notwithstanding people choosing to have kids a bit later in life than they used to.
