But that was an era of Growth Capitalism, where we couldn’t possibly leave a single bare patch of dirt between Rosenberg and The Woodlands. Everything had to be paved. And we unleashed phenomenal human labor and material resources to accomplish it all. By contrast, we can’t seem to build shit for shit now. Money just falls into some bottomless pit of bureaucracy and graft.

Yeah, the reason that sprawl was able to work is that it was built around a Ponzi scheme.