Which is exactly what happened with the GI Bill’s requirement that government-guaranteed home loans go only to new construction, or the Eisenhower administration’s decision to build forty thousand miles of heavily subsidized highways. The relative advantage of car-dependent suburban living didn’t come from the impersonal forces of the market in action, but from a sequence of decisions made by fallible human beings, decisions that could very easily have gone in an entirely different direction.
103. old walkability lost due to new, cheap, subsidized construction in GI Bill, out in cheap land suburbs.
