Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street?
  First and foremost, we need to abolish the laws that caused 
  this all to happen. Yes, that’s right – all of this was 
  required to happen, by law. Many people think that sprawl is 
  a free market phenomenon, and they are exactly wrong. Sprawl 
  is caused by the following policies – I call these Sprawl 
  Laws; you can find them for yourself in your local city code 
  (for the most succinct explanation, see this paper[1]):

  * Zoning
  * Setbacks
  * Minimum parking requirements
  * Minimum lot sizes
  * Maximum units per lot
  * Minimum road widths

Add school district zoning into the mix, and you have the full recipe for where our cities are today.[1] http://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...