Houston and Phoenix are 2/5 top 10 cities in America and both have a lower population density than the small farming city I live in of 50k people. America is just huge.
Yes, car-centric land use is horribly inefficient and the core of the problem. You can either throw good money after bad as a matter of public policy, or you can start strategically increasing density.
But it's a choice. There are a lot of folks out there in the "good money after bad" camp who focus too much on what is and what was rather than what could be.
