<i>On the West Coast, most of the small suburban cities never had a town center to begin with. They were designed by real estate developers using standardized high-profit low-density building plans, entirely focused on cars over walking anywhere.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know what you are talking about. I don&#x27;t believe this to be true of California generally. It is somewhat true of the LA area, but it was always true of LA, before the cult of the car became a thing. In the case of the LA area, it was not possible to develop it without developing large tracts of land in one go because of the cost of bringing infrastructure to the desert. However, when it began, there were trolleys and the like and you could comfortably live without a car. You just used the trolley or other public transit.<p>Also, the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the few places in the US with population density comparable to parts of Europe. So it has relatively good public transit for the US.<p>Yes, a lot of America has made it essentially against the rules to create the kind of walkable cities that we once had. The New Urbanism movement was all about trying to find a way to recreate that in spite of the current zoning and legal climate that has whored out development to the cult of the car.<p>I don&#x27;t know how to fix it, but I feel like you really don&#x27;t know the history here that you are badmouthing. It is more complicated than that.