They don’t build neighborhoods like they used to. That’s at the root of the housing crisis that plagues rich coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

I’m going to use LA as an illustration. In the popular mind, Los Angeles is defined by the freeway, the automobile, and endless suburban sprawl. Four million people live in the city proper, and nineteen million live in the megalopolis. Four in five Angelenos drive to work, while only one in twenty takes mass transit.

The horrible irony of all of this is that LA was never designed to be a car city. Quite the opposite. The bulk of Los Angeles was laid out before World War II around the old Red Car system of the Pacific Electric Railway. They just overlaid the postwar freeway system on top of it. At its peak, the Red Car system had over 1000 miles of track, but the system went into a terminal decline as the automobile and the bus gained popularity.