Part of my point is that I think the cause-effect relationship may be reversed anyway. Texas is also so hot in the summer that people will not be walking outsid

Part of my point is that I think the cause-effect relationship may be reversed anyway. Texas is also so hot in the summer that people will not be walking outside for any appreciable period of time; it becomes a health risk after a certain point when temperatures can be above 100F / 90% humidity for months on end. It’s not an accident that Texas looked more like Montana in 1900 than California. The mass adoption of automobiles and air conditioning made large cities in Texas possible; and the low population density made land cheap. The centers of most big southern cities were never walkable. Most of those cities would never have existed without cars. I don’t know how you introduce density into a situation like that, and I don’t think zoning rules would be able to undo the damage of the last century. These cities were built around cars, and you can’t just roll that back without remaking the whole city and displacing many, many people.