Ask a small home owner, or car owner, why they are against climate change measures. They will point out that their life would need to change, and that’s why.

It’s perhaps a little tangential to the “merits of capitalism” topic, but it’s worth noting that the circumstances that caused such a large percentage of the U.S. population to own single-family houses or cars – the Suburban Experiment – is substantially the result of deliberate policy choices by the Federal government starting around the 1930s:

• Euclid v. Ambler established the legality of single-use zoning, which enabled the advent of single-family house subdivisions that outlawed having things like front yard businesses, destroying walkability.

• The Federal Housing Administration was created, which not only published development guidelines that embodied the modernist¹ city planning ideas popular at the time (they literally had e.g. diagrams showing side-by-side plan views of traditional main-street-style shops and shopping centers with parking lots, with the former labeled “bad” and the latter labeled “good”), but also enforced them by making compliance with those guidelines part² of the underwriting criteria for government-backed loans.

• The Federal government passed massive subsidies for building highways, while comparatively neglecting the railroads and metro transit systems.

Of course, that isn’t to say that there wasn’t corporate influence shaping those policies! From the General Motors streetcar conspiracy to the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it’s obvious that the automotive industry had a huge impact. It’s less obvious – or perhaps I should say, less “provable” – that said influence was corrupt (in terms of, say, bribing politicians to implement policies the public didn’t otherwise actually want) rather than merely reflective of the prevailing public sentiment of the times, but I don’t disbelieve it either.

TL;DR: I’m not necessarily taking a position on whether it was proverbial “big government” or “big business” to blame for America’s car dependency, but I am saying that it’s definitely incorrect to characterize it as merely the emergent result of individual choices by members of the public. Those individual choices were made subject to circumstances that both government and business had huge amounts of power over, and that fact cannot be ignored.

¹ For more info on “modernist city planning” read up on stuff like the Garden City movement started by Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that Wright himself helped write those FHA guidelines, but I can’t find the reference anymore. : (

² It would be irresponsible not to point out that redlining and racial segregation were massively important factors in all this, too. However, this comment is intended to focus on the change in urban form itself, so hopefully folks won’t get too upset that I’m limiting it to this footnote.