The first walkable city in America in a century

Likely because they wanted that full control and had the wealth to achieve it. They may want this for several reasons, like because generally people like having control, or maybe because they thought this had the fewest barriers to success.

Getting changes voted in can be difficult, even if the changes are objectively good: a) a small number of people are engaged enough to vote on municipal issues, b) sometime people are just suspicious of any change whatsoever and so reflexively vote to keep things the same, c) almost always there will be some people(s) who will not benefit from the change and will fight very hard to sabotage/corrupt/discredit it.

I have traveled all over the US several times over as part of my job for the last 8 years. I've stayed in, worked from, and explored way too many American cities.

Most American cities have a small walkable core, that is unaffordable for most, surrounded by affordable, but completely car-dependent, suburbs.

Public transportation in most of these walkable cores is a complete joke. Most rely on buses that don't go where you need to be and don't come often or reliably enough to build a routine around.

To wit: the only cities that I travel to that I can safely avoiding renting a car in are NYC, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Traveling to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER CITY requires calculating and pre-planning how long it will take to go places by bus or light rail (if they have it!), juxtaposing that against the customer I'll be visiting and destinations that look interesting, and ultimately concluding "yeah, a rental car's easier." Mind you, I LOVE walking and can walk miles and miles per day when given the option!

The suburbs that run rampant throughout the US don't have sidewalks, cluster everything you need into shopping centers (with comical parking lot sizes that, you guessed it, is completely unsafe to walk through because of cars driving all over it) and have road plans that encourage high-speed traffic feeds into large highways/freeways at the cost of making walking completely infeasible.

(Oh, right, and flying 15+ mph past these already bonkers high speed limits is so completely normal, that driving the actual speed limit becomes dangerous! Imagine riding your bike on a two-lane 45mph road with no sidewalks or shoulder where the drivers behind you would travel 60mph on if given the chance. Aggression central. That was my life for two years. Worst two years of my life in that aspect.)

But, hey, you can get a huge (2400+ sq. ft.) house "for the kids", a yard for the dogs and kids to "safely" run around it, and a two-car garage to store an ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE amount of pure crap with your mandatory cars parked in front of it for less than $350,000!

This becomes increasingly true the more Southern the city is.

I don't have data to back this, but I strongly believe that the modern suburb is THE driving force behind the increased divisiveness our country is experiencing (or the maxim of the divisiveness that has always existed within this country). The suburbs are designed from their core to separate and isolate, a feature only exacerbated by the infinite stream of entertainment that today's Internet provides. Community only happens naturally when people are close to each other, and that just doesn't happen within suburbs.