This is not true. The interstate highway system was a massive improvement to our country and enabled us to leap ahead. There are always sour grapes from people who had to move, but moving should not be a big deal.
The interstate highway system between cities, and around cities, was a great improvement.
The interstate highway system through cities was a disaster that mostly served to turn economically productive land into craters of parking lots generating very little tax revenue. Those with the means fled severed neighborhoods with spiking pollution levels, leaving the poor with asthma in their wake. While some cities managed to recover in the following decades, not all of them have.
And suburbs that people fled to are not necessarily faring any better; suburbs are cheap to live in initially but become extremely expensive when you start having to replace infrastructure at the end of its life. Nassau County, NY, home of the first generation of suburbs, has been under state fiscal control since 2000 despite being one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, because the fiscal math does not add up.
A lot of the suburban growth that happened was also just shuffling it around a region rather than true growth. For example, Buffalo's metro area has tripled in land area despite the same population, so the same tax base is now expected to support triple the infrastructure.
