America Needs Small Apartment Buildings
I sometimes wonder why smalltown America prefers "trailer parks" over small-to-midsized apartments.  Instead of spreading out over dozens of acres, you could have a couple of complexes with nice communal gardens/parks/playgrounds and have people live vertically densely enough to encourage shops.<p>Instead they either have single family homes (that's okay) or they have trailer parks --if it's a college town then they have squat apartment buildings with little in the way of design other than cheap and utilitarian with very little noise dampening, for the most part.<p>If you travel thru rural California (HWYs 49, 120, 99, etc) there is so much sprawl consisting of cheap housing --instead of gobbling up farmland with crappy buildings they could build alright apartment buildings resulting in better quality of life for the residents (better concentrated service, more walkable for the poor folks, etc.) on the other hand, fewer taxes for the municipality, given the property tax system.