It's going to be tough doing this in a lot of US cities, especially those which had most of their growth after WW2. So much was built with the assumption that all transportation would be via car (or bus as an afterthought, sometimes). You can probably do it in an old downtown area but good luck trying it in suburbia
The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward.
There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.
Well, a lot of America is white and middle class. The push to move to suburbs was fueled by the white middle class, who fled the cities during and after desegregation, and was termed the White Flight.
There's a very real displacement problem that's linked to the urban population growth that you seem skeptical of; marginalized communities are being priced out of their long-time homes, being pushed out of urban centers and into suburbs and exurbs.
Anyway, census data shows strong growth of urban areas, and tepid growth of rural areas, which are a shrinking fraction of the US population.
Some cities have seen astonishing growth:
> Among urbanized areas with populations of 1 million or more, the Charlotte, N.C.-S.C., area grew at the fastest rate, increasing by 64.6 percent, followed by the Austin, Texas, area, at 51.1 percent, and Las Vegas-Henderson, Nev., at 43.5 percent.
Mind you, "urban" by census definitions is very broad. I live in the middle of about 100 acres with a couple of neighbors 40 miles outside of a major city and I'm considered urban.
A lot or urbanization isn't Brooklyn. It's smaller cities with minimal transit systems.
