Miss a payment? Good luck moving that car (2014)
The shameful fact is that we have not only enthusiastically embraced - but required by force of law - that Americans cannot participate in the economy without a private vehicle maintained in good repair.<p>Perhaps in the 50&#x27;s you could say &quot;well there are plenty of pre-car places you can still live and work,&quot; but first we spent the 60&#x27;s bulldozing those places to put in freeways and parking lots, then most of them hollowed out as the jobs moved to the suburbs, and now, strangely enough, they&#x27;re revitalizing as lifestyle areas that are very expensive to live in.<p>This, more than anything, has cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. We&#x27;re not going to fix any of the major societal issues in the US until we fix our suburban development pattern. We need to quit spreading dense splatters of suburban homes butter thin between massive gaps of poorly utilized land (aka &quot;leapfrog development&quot; made possible only because subdivisions get to externalize their infrastructure and public service costs), stop hyper regulating development so that it takes years of professional work to get a simple building permit, and design for safe pedestrian access as a first priority, so that car ownership becomes optional rather than mandatory.<p>When it comes to housing and development we live in a state planned economy and it&#x27;s failing us just as surely as all the others.