The problem with new towns now versus the 1800's is now all land has an owner in the USA with legal protections, in the 1800's we just took land from the occupa

The problem with new towns now versus the 1800's is now all land has an owner in the USA with legal protections, in the 1800's we just took land from the occupants the native Americans - it's sort of like a Platonic ideal to start from scratch but never going to happen without a disruptive event. Europe just got lucky that so much of their cities were pre-automobile age, USA got unlucky in that sense. That sort of brings us back to the Amazon/sports type bidding war with incentives from local government entities.