He forgets that the virtue of markets is that they give people what they want. No developer gets rich by building housing and projects that people dislike. Los Angeles is not the sprawl capital of the world. The reasons include small lot sizes , a sizeable stock of apartments and high dwelling densities among the large immigrant population. Most people throughout the country are choosing to live away from commercial areas, enjoying the private spaces afforded by single-family homes set back from streets and the mobility and accessiblity offered by the private automobile.
Rail transit has an impossible fit to modern cities.
U.S. rail transit investments have been costly failures that have paradoxically resulted in less transit use as bus funds were cannibalized for rail. Los Angeles, as a typical example, has lost more than a fifth of its transit riders since it started spending billions of dollars on rail. In the new Mecca of urban planning, transit accounts for only 2.8 percent of trips, with a mere 0.3 percent using MAX, and only about one percent of the Tri-Met's service area population is within walking distance of MAX stations. But air quality in Los Angeles has been improving dramatically year by year, even during its rapid growth phase of the 1980s. There were only seven smog alerts in the 1996 smog season compared with 121 in 1977.