A very European attitude, don't you think? If gas is cheap enough, distance becomes less of an issue, especially when you have no choice anyway.

The U.S. was a country of farmers only a few generations ago, and it shows in the our preferred housing.  Suburban homes are symbolic farms, with back yards instead of the back forty.  

Laura Ingalls Wilder's father used to say that when you could see the smoke from your neighbor's house, it was time to move on, and a lot of Americans seem to have similar ideas.  My boss grew up in a row house in Boston, and hated it.  He now lives a 45 minute commute away from his job, on five acres so he won't have any neighbors.  

First you have to define "long-range".  60 miles each way?  100 miles each way?  Those folks are indeed rare.

One complicating factor is that you have married couples both of whom have jobs.  One may change jobs, but if they move to be closer to that job then the other one might be further.

Another complicating factor is affordability - housing closer in tends to be a lot more expensive.  On the flip side though, there are lots of people who wouldn't consider a condo or apartment and just gotta have that standalone house, and if that's what you want then you end up living further out.  Another complicating factor is just the crass materialism in our country - this causes people to buy lots of crap, and if you have lots of crap, then you need a larger house to hold all of that crap.

Some of the problems are self-inflicted by goverments.  There is this tendancy to have separate areas for businesses and housing, and they aren't always close to each other.  In fact, inner suburbs have tended to emphasize office buildings, which means that there is insufficient housing nearby for all of the people who work in those office buildings.

I work in the Buckhead area of Atlanta (which is farther from home than downtown Atlanta). My husband teaches at Kennesaw State University, in a suburb of Atlanta. We live near my husband's work, making a long commute for me.

But on the good news front, my brother may have sold his Mcmansion in Orlando and is going to downsize in the big way despite his wife's objections..

I think one of the key reasons for the long commute is the undesirability of the inner suburbs as a place to raise a family. This isn't necessarily because of crime,  it is also because of the quality of schools,  the busy streets and the air polution.  When people have children they will sacrifice almost anything including many hours of their life commuting so that their children have the right environment in which to grow.

Furthermore, once settled, people are reluctant to move as their children become embedded into their schools and neighborhoods. Hence, commutes often get worse as people's jobs change while their kids are growing up.

One final perceived advantage of an exburb is that young families often want to build a new house and it's often easier and less expensive to build a new house in an exurb than it is in an older more fully built inner suburb.

I don't fully understand why so many people are willing to build huge houses on small lots, thereby giving up most of what could be nice yards.
 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195049837/102-2973107-9492943?v=glance&n=283155

I live in a rural county.  The "American Dream" around here is to have a lot of land so that you can't even see any of your neighbors.  Nearly everyone who can afford it lives on a mult-acre lot and commutes on back country roads to work.  The land is very cheap, and until recently, the extra driving might only cost you a dollar or two a day.  All of these properties are on former farms.  As farming became unprofitable, the 150 acre farms got bought by an investor, who then sold it off in multiple 5 to 20 acre parcels for individual development.  If grain production continues to drop, however, one good thing is that this land can be easily converted back to a farm.  For some strange reason, these people insist on mowing their lawns.  It's not unusual to maintain 10 acres of lawn even though they never use it at all (unless you consider 5 hours every weekend on a riding lawn mower to be enjoyable).  I live in town.  If I lived out in the country and I wasn't running a farm, I would want to live in the woods, not in the middle of 20 acres of grass.  It seems that people around here have a strange notion that we have to tame nature.  That keeping a lawn is somehow improving the land, whereas to let it grow wild and back into a maple-beech forest would somehow be a moral failing.  

Those who are furthest from their jobs are most vulnerable to energy-cost run-ups. As home prices rose in the frothiest areas, homebuyers mainly have done two things to augment house affordability: They financed with risky, interest-only loans to ensure the lowest-possible payments and moved farther out from employment centers, where prices are lower.

It's not unusual for commuters to drive more than 60 miles (97 kilometers) one-way in southern or northern California or for New York-bound workers to live in eastern Pennsylvania. This has happened where houses were already priced well above the national average. Four-hour commutes aren't unusual now around several large cities.

Suburbanization pattern = accelerated and worse.