The Legacy of Prohibition

As a culture, America has minimal capacity for multifamily urbanism. We used to know how to do it, then we made it illegal for so long we lost the know-how. And the infrastructure, and the institutions. And so to do it again, we have to reinvent it all over again. We have to change the laws, build the infrastructure, develop the institutions. It's slow going.  It's like Prohibition, when we banned alcohol. Except that the ban has gone on so long that all the former brewers are dead or retired, and banks no longer know how to estimate the risk of breweries, so they won't fund them, and cities still won't permit them to locate within city limits. Oh, and anyone who buys a bottle of non-alcoholic juice gets a 10% discount from the Federal Government, and doesn't have to pay sales tax.