Americans who came of age in earlier decades fell in love with the automobile. It became an appendage of their lives, like mobile phones today, the symbol of freedom, a way to escape parents and prying eyes.

As they grew into adults, many of them walked little more than the few yards from parking lot to their job in an office building or from the garage into their house at the end of the day.

That generation rushed to the suburbs, created for cars, difficult to serve with mass transit. The central city was left to those too poor to buy a vehicle.

The modern city actually began in the Middle Ages as a place for merchants and shop owners to lessen dependence on the landed gentry. Modern employers are again discovering the advantage of clustering in urban spaces. Today, Seattle, the largest city in my area, is a city for the well off young worker, especially those employed by tech companies. Some employees even walk to work. Many take mass transit.

However, lower income workers are not faring as well, once again forced into spaces less and less attractive as they move further out to escape rising rents. They inherit suburbs now spurned by the more well-off. Of course, living in suburbs often requires them to buy cars to travel to work . . .