Shaila Dewan, writing for the New York Times:
The price of sprawl has become been increasingly undeniable. Moderate-income families have seen their transportation costs balloon to more than a quarter of their income. Cities have discovered that low-density developments fail to pay for their own infrastructure. More recently, a new study of economic mobility suggested that sprawl, and its accompanying lack of transportation options, prevented access to higher paying jobs.
I’ve long found it fascinating to look at photos of American cities at the turn 1900s, like San Francisco or New York. The chaos quotient is high.
In many ways, they remind me of the industrializing economies of today. The streets and back-alleys of Africa and southeast and east Asia are just as chaotic as American cities once were. Regular folks move to cities in search of economic opportunity and advancement, but don’t really want to be there; their kids grow up in cities and don’t want to go back to the countryside. The cities struggle to handle the growth spurt at first, but city leadership eventually figures out how to keep order and build infrastructure.
I wonder how to get the good parts of smaller, tighter communities without losing the economic opportunity that makes large cities so vibrant.