> I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along na

> I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. So we...don't do that. Bluntly speaking, it's trivial: all of these issues are of our own making in America. We have hundreds of examples just in Europe of how to make car-lite, walkable, nice cities and towns and that's just on a single continent. And that's artificially restricting ourselves to a single continent with societies that look the most like ours. A quick pivot to most of eastern Asia will show much more variety in how to build those areas. (I will pause here and throw right out the idea that "Europe is much smaller than the United States so we couldn't possibly..." There is no reason we cannot duplicate those same cityscapes all across the United States; we have sub-national states and counties for a reason.) We are car-centric and spread out because we choose to be. So we either change those choices and make the commensurate political and financial changes to go along with it, or we don't and we accept the consequences of things like "large swaths of the West Coast burn to the ground" and "we are stuck in our metal boxes powered by carbon fuels or batteries backed by precious rare earth minerals." We already spent a couple trillion dollars propping up the stock market for nothing more than paper gains; the argument that we "can't afford it" is laughable.