This is a monumental issue in how American cities develop.<p>I'm from the south and am currently moving from one southern city (Durham - which is near Raleigh - NC) to another (Nashville, TN) and it's depressing to see how both places keep making the same mistakes (Nashville is maybe 20 years further down the road to failure than Raleigh, though).<p>What are those mistakes? Designing all these unwalkable neighborhoods filled with single family dwellings with no cross streets or any retail corridors, then cramming them in along "strips" that connect them to the Old City and accumulate strip malls (eventually, holding so much traffic that they are a nightmare to navigate).<p>So what you end up with, is the Old City has an actual grid of sorts, with cross streets and some walkability, with commercial near residential, and feels vibrant. But most people simply can't afford those areas, because they're so desirable for the people who recognize the value of this.<p>Since the old areas are so expensive, most people have to buy into one of the aforementioned crappy new neighborhoods, and suffer all the subtle ill effects of being isolated from most other humans by walls of traffic. When individual developers buy these massive swathes of land in (formerly) rural areas, they optimize for the short term profit they can make from selling the new homes, and nothing else.<p>As more of those crappy neighborhoods pile up, the traffic gets worse, and getting to/from the core parts of town becomes more and more painful. In this respect Raleigh fares better better, but only because rather than having one city center, the Raleigh area has many (Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and various other small towns). The web of sprawl grows between these places, but in each core is a small grid with retail, which means that as the megalopolis fills in all the gaps (rather than growing outward in ever increasing circles from a single center point) people can remain close to something attractive.<p>One big issue is that the cookie-cutter neighborhoods have no grid system that connects to their surroundings, and instead there's just limited ingress/egress from the neighborhood onto the main strips. The developers don't own adjacent corridors, so there is no short term incentive to connect to them. This creates vast areas where no retail could ever exist, because they're along dead-end cul-de-sacs which "belong" to individual neighborhoods.<p>I don't really know what the solution is. I don't really think humans want to live in these places, but there are no incentives to do better for builders, and real estate is treated as a valuable commodity, so here we are. In the south, where rural land is cheap, it all feels depressingly inevitable.<p>I'd love to see a counterpoint of a city (especially a Southern city, in a red state) that has taken a different approach to development, which has managed to prioritize connectivity and walkability in a successful manner.