Depends on the definition of 'suburb'. We live in San Mateo county, suburbs to the south of San Francisco city. For the longest time it was mostly residential neighborhoods consisting of mainly 1-story ranch homes with a sprinkling of 2-story homes. The Silicon Valley tech explosion changed everything. San Francisco always had residential towers, but is now experiencing runaway crowded conditions. The overflow of buyers seeking space moved their attention to surrounding suburbs, which are now up in arms over becoming mini-"San Franciscos". This is within perhaps 50 miles radius of SF. We were in a sleepy residential town. Now we're being overrun with construction cranes building skyscrapers among our homes, and the streets are having problems dealing with traffic jams. We have companies building here, each bringing in 1,000 employees, while there is not enough housing for them; so city councils changed zoning laws permitting high-rise residential towers where they used to only allow single-family dwellings. Homes that used to sell for $100,000 a few decades ago are now well over $1 million. In my town South San Francisco, which is well south of SF in another county, minimum price to buy a home is $1 million. My kids can't afford that. One daughter moved out of state where homes are $200,000 and nicer. Another daughter rents nearby for $3000/month. She lived for a while in Kansas and Texas where it was much cheaper, but moved back to SSF because she missed it (plus making three times the money here). If you lived here, you would see daily that there is a lack of space to build housing while there is an influx of people wanting the good paying jobs, and no one likes commuting due to congested freeways. There is space way out there where there are no jobs, so that is creating the pressure to build upwards in suburbs which are tapped out.
We have the same issue along the Hudson River coast here in NJ, caused by the same dynamic (which comes into play in Seattle and Portland as well): inability to grow in all directions due to water, and resulting upward growth. The growth described by my friend would be eastward (in the CA example); it can’t happen like that here in NJ (westward) because the land is much more limited, and fully developed already - suburbs stretched westwards towards the Delaware River until that critical point was reached where commuting was no longer viable, and the former “sleepy towns” quickly caught up with those to the east in terms of taxes. In fact, some of the areas furthest west in NJ gambled on a boom that never happened, and overbuilt; the intended residents either moved a little further into Pennsylvania, or left NJ altogether rather than deal with the high costs in the new areas.
Another key difference here in NJ is the access to good-paying jobs; the area was already losing many of them (see the high number of vacancies in the WTC on 9/11 - 20 years ago), and employers would rather hire white-collar Asian scabs than Americans. The dwindling/dying/fleeing American middle class in NJ is being replaced by a Latino permanent underclass and an Asian middle class; the county across the Hudson River from mid-town NYC (just north of me) recently added Korean to English and Spanish on all official business.
I don’t believe Amazon ever truly intended to open their “HQ2” in NYC simply because there aren’t 25,000 skilled professionals awaiting those jobs paying six figures; they’ve already been forced out to follow good jobs elsewhere (primarily in the southeast, where the employers went). At this point it is hard to attract new businesses because the taxes/business climate are so bad, and like many cities (though on a statewide scale), there is no longer a skilled workforce lying around idle waiting for work - it is an expensive area for those without work.