Everyone is talking about Ellen Dunham-Jones’ TED talk on Retrofitting Suburbia:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
By the way David Sucher gets it exactly wrong here taking Big Media Matt to task:

Odd. Nowhere does Dunham-Jones argue against “legal impediments to this kind of adaptation.” She doesn’t address the subject at all and in fact her whole presentation is based on her research into purely free-market adaptations.
Of course as they says, if you are a carpenter, the solution to every problem is a hammer. Perhaps for Yglesias the solution to every problem is government intervention.

Yglesias is fundamentally correct: current governmental restrictions on land use, which started in a just manner to protect citizens, now make it virtually impossible to create walkable urbanism in existing cities. I wrote about this concerning my hometown of Westerville, Ohio:

Not only is Uptown Westerville denser, but also is universally loved and desired throughout Westerville. It is where you went on first dates, where you got ice cream, where you went to buy cute gifts for your mom on Mother’s Day. But for some reason Westerville restricts this type of development, when it should expanded.

Not only do people love walkable urbanism, but developers are building twisted facsimiles of downtowns – which are really just outdoor malls – and making huge amounts of money. Just look at Easton Town Center which is less than 15 minutes away from Westerville:

The solution is to change the zoning rules to allow higher density building. That might be what David is talking about government intervention, but to me, it seems that allowing people the freedom to build a bit denser lessens David’s horrible government intervention.