My real advocacy is we should use the same level of eminent domain effort we took when we cut cities in half to build freeways out to winding suburbias full of

My real advocacy is we should use the same level of eminent domain effort we took when we cut cities in half to build freeways out to winding suburbias full of giant malls to center life around driving and transform the cities again. It takes a lot of bravado and gumption to seize control of destiny like that and I think Americans at least have collectively lost that kind of imaginary. The modern apartment buildings are endemic of it. They are the closest thing you could get to the Jetsons; 30 feet of parking with the first floor of residency literally in the sky. They look like concrete fortresses with iron bars protecting parked cars. The only way in and out of the urban prison is to use your car as a key. If you're on foot, it's some side door. These things are extremely hostile to community building and offer the same clinical separation and isolation narrative of the redlined suburb of the 1950s. It's the lonely by design individualist approach to cosmopolitan living and personally I find it repulsive. Better, friendly buildings, fewer cars, more green space, this is all possible. Tokyo pulls it off pretty nicely. We just need to exercise the political power to make it happen