Comment by xp84

I see you here - you make very good points. It just seems like economically it’s too hard to manifest more of those pleasant, walkable cities and neighborhoods into existence in a way that they aren’t just as costly to live in as the existing ones. You can’t just build Williamsburg on the next available spot of land next to the last suburb, because no one will want to live there without a car when there isn’t a subway right in the neighborhood to take them to Manhattan in 25 minutes.

So, they just aren’t making many net new walkable cities or converting previously car-dependent ones into walkable paradises. The only newly-built ones are built on insanely expensive land (because of the proximity to great transit and/or very high paying jobs), so they’re really only feasible for people with at least $250k annual incomes, which isn’t most people. I think a lot of people know all this instinctively and therefore are against even talking about it because they see it as an unsolvable problem.