If I were a carpenter...

...I'd use a hammer on teeth cavities.

Matt Yglesias offers an excellent talk by Ellen Dunham-Jones on Retrofitting Suburbia. But one thing he says is

One thing I wish she emphasized more, however, is the legal impediments to this kind of adaptation. I think a lot of people will look at her presentation and say "if transforming these uses is so great, why don't developers/businessmen — the market— do it on their own." And a big part of the answer is that the prevailing land use regulations don't permit it.

Odd. Nowhere does Dunham-Jones argue against "legal impediments to this kind of adaptation." She doesn't address the subject at all and in fact her whole presentation is based on her research into purely free-market adaptations.

Of course as they says, if you are a carpenter, the solution to every problem is a hammer. Perhaps for Yglesias the solution to every problem is government intervention.

Certainly I didn't hear the same Dunham-Jones talk as did Yglesias. But it was a good talk, so follow the link.