Today, most American cities are characterized by decaying central downtowns from which residents and businesses have fled to low-density suburbs spreading out around a network of increasingly congested freeways. This development pattern consumes open space, wastes resources, and leaves historic central cities with a reduced tax base and fewer civic leaders living or working in downtown neighborhoods. Streets, parks, schools, and civic buildings fall into disrepair at the same time that these facilities are being duplicated at great expense in new suburbs. The poor who are left behind when the upper and middle classes abandon the city center often can't find jobs where they live and have no way to commute to the suburbs where jobs are now located. The low-density development of suburbs is racially and economically exclusionary because it provides no affordable housing and makes it impractical to design a viable public transit system...