What a crock of puke.
Massively, upwardly dense cities like New York city are completely unsustainable without “subsidies”, for everything from housing to food, to trash disposal, to transportation. And, take a survey of a large southwestern city vs a place like Chicago or New York and you also find the distance in the average “wage gap” is greater in the dense, urban liberal cities.
As for zoning and planning, Houston has very little zoning and only minimal planning but has more “affordable” housing ON THE MARKET, per capita, than any liberal, dense, high-rise city in the nation.
The only thing high-rise dense cities do is turn people into sheep; and the group-think in such places can be noticeable to American visitors there.
While the particular housing markets that saw the largest rates of new building and excess in the last housing-market bubble are many in the southwest, the manner of building, the style, did not create the bubble; and transportation “subsidies” for southwestern highways are no greater per-capita, per-passenger-mile than the “public transportation” subsidies that keep Amtrac and ALL major-city transit systems running.
People who write these things have never traveled this country by car. They sit in their ivory towers reading statistics and making correlation try to equal causation, while ignoring the human factor.
FYI