You can't have the Brooklyn Bohemian life without Brooklyn city planning. The modern suburban sprawl demands two-car households, and two-car households demand full-time middle-class employment.
[1] The Council for Community and Economic Research: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-most-expensive-places-to-li...
What America doesn't realize, even the supposed most intelligent and informed, is that we are no different than any other people living under a controlling regime, we just have more resources to burn that allow the margins for error to be humongous compared to other places. The controlled media, corrupt politics, the rationalized abuse of laws you are destroyed for not abiding by, the propaganda, the war mongering, the racist subjugation of certain groups. It's all there, we just don't see it, as a people, because as with the same form of national socialism that destroyed Germany in the early 20th century, the American version of national socialism has brain-washed people into doing, thinking, and saying things to and about others that they would never want happen to themselves.