Big finance and decades of government policy pushed America toward strip malls, tract housing, and giant apartment blocks — bad for anyone who wants a walkable, charming neighborhood, good for investors who never set foot there.

• The corner 7-Eleven is often owned by a real estate trust, which is owned by index funds — meaning ordinary savers are the absentee landlords.
• Lending rules, tax breaks, and zoning make single-use projects easy to finance, while mixed-use neighborhoods with shops under apartments are hard.
• Washington built this on purpose: Hoover-era zoning standards helped big builders scale, and New Deal programs plus Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed people into mortgage debt.
• When the money comes from a teachers' pension in Ontario or Alaska's oil fund, nobody involved cares what the place looks like — Alaska's fund owns half of Tysons Corner, Virginia.
• The neighborhoods people actually love and photograph were mostly built before World War II, when the country was poorer.

Outlook: Nothing changes until the tax code, federal housing agencies, and local zoning stop favoring scale — and no such shift is in motion.