So I survived the earthquake – oddly enough, I was standing on the San Andreas Fault only yesterday.

This is relevant, responding to that Kevin Drum post:

Stop thinking in terms of new towns in North America, and think about channeling this process of urbanization into key corridors and existing infrastructure, and about fighting for a renewed investment in urban infrastructure throughout the metropolitan region. This has never been Dubai or China or India where new cities are being designed from scratch. Our potent mixture of populism + corporate power is going to be part of the equation, like it always has been. The "suburban retrofit" - slowly remaking parts of existing communities through adding bike paths, accessory dwelling units, small nodes of transit -oriented multi-family housing and jobs, new transit line, to name a few things - is going to be hard to accomplish, but it is where we need to go, not down the road of New Urbanist greenfield, neo-modernist fantasies like Seaside or Celebration.

Yes. So often the New Urbanist narrative is about product rather than process, or about density rather than urbanity. The latter is much harder to achieve – it isn't just about constructing big mixed-use developments and expecting it all to come together.