> I don't think we've switched out of the Moses model yet, or we only did in the last twenty years or so
We did. Most large cities stopped building new roads, and are instead sabotaging existing ones ("road diets").
The inflection point was some time in 1990-s. October 1992 is the date of the completion of the last Interstate freeway.
> And frankly the urbanist model probably still won't be sufficient without public housing—I'm guessing a popular push for that is still about 10-20 years out.
The thing is, we don't have a housing crisis. We have around 20% more units per capita than in 1980-s, and way more square footage per capita. What we have is an over-centralization crisis.
No amount of band-aid fixes will make it better. By forcing (via economic forces) more people into misery centrals (now with housing projects to generate generational poverty!), you'll only make centralization even worse.
> Public transit works well enough for most folks!
It really doesn't. Transit is a result of city growth, you simply _have_ to build transit once the city becomes dense enough.
And I get it, in the 1970-s and 1980-s people were still worried about overpopulation. So, urbanism was born as a way to make it more bearable to live in dense cities. Now we have an opposite problem, the native US population is peaking right now and whatever growth we're going to have will be only from immigration. We don't _need_ dense cities.