It’s pretty easy to destroy a walkable place. We’ve been doing it for so long, it’s almost second nature. Step 1: Prioritize auto travel. Require every new building to be surrounded by lots of parking and require every new street to be designed for high-volume, fast-moving traffic. Step 2: Designate separate areas for people to live, work and shop, and don’t allow any of these “uses” to mingle. Step 3…. Well, actually, the first two will do it.

I could go on. We could talk about over-zealous fire marshals, outdated subdivision regulations that recommend cul-de-sacs instead of connected streets, federal policies that prioritize single-family suburban homes over mixed-use buildings, and inadequate transit systems. We could certainly talk about redlined neighborhoods, the Interstate Highway Act, and urban “renewal”—policies that transformed American cities like the Allied bombers transformed Dresden.

But let’s keep it simple. Over decades—one parcel and one building at a time—we have created new places where it’s virtually impossible to survive without a car, while systematically chipping away at the older places that used to be fully functioning, walkable, high-yield neighborhoods. Little by little, these once thriving areas have been degraded until they no longer work for people on foot.

OK, so mistakes were made, as the politicians like to say.

I can almost forgive the mistakes of the past. (Well, not all of them. The more I learn about the history of federal housing policy, the more it makes my head explode. I also retroactively hate everyone responsible for demolishing architectural treasures because someone wanted more parking or a building made of precast concrete. For the perpetrators of these crimes, I’m going to hold a grudge.)

But I really do believe that most people had good intentions and acted in good faith. I’m sure that for the past 70 years, most civil engineers, city planners and members of local planning commissions thought they were doing the right thing to make their cities better. All that “shiny and new” stuff probably looked pretty good at the time.