The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure.<p>Changes are needed to zoning, road design, price of parking, state and municipal tax allocations, etc.<p>The primary problem is that suburban sprawl is cheap for residents, because it is very heavily subsidized, defers many of its costs to the future, and completely ignores the costs of nasty externalities like pollution and environmental destruction.<p>Based on the required infrastructure per capita, if prices matched costs, living in the city should be dramatically cheaper than living in sprawl. In practice, because well designed cities are old, with limited capacity, and it is illegal to build new ones in many places, living in a nice city ends up being much more expensive than living in sprawl.