So, the thing about the US is that we became cum slaves to the car companies. That’s not the whole picture, there’s, of course, other factors like white flight and other racism-based phenomena, big oil lobbying, etc. etc. but any other industry would gladly murder their mother to have the kind of absolute entrenchment and societal dependency that the car industry has in the US. For seventy years, every urban policy has bent itself around the concerns of cars and the people who own them, including the transfer of wealth from downtowns that pay well more than they consume in taxes to the suburbs who consume far more than they pay in taxes. There’s a reason why US urbans are uniquely terrible, even among NATO and other capitalist countries.

I’m glad for China, everyone deserves to have good cities. I don’t think that having good urbans again is out of the reach of the US, even without a revolution. It’s just going to take time, a lot of time, and consistent action at the local, state, and federal levels.