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Your solution requires we fix culture, infrastructure, housing, affordability, mass transit, and urban spaces.

No, my solution requires we fix zoning. Just that; only zoning. A change that can be made at the stroke of a pen. The rest will get handled naturally as the market reacts to that change. (This is because the other problems you mentioned like lack of housing quantity and affordability and non-viability of mass transit are caused by restrictive zoning!)

Reality can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

You want to talk about reality? Okay, here's the reality: suburbs are not natural. They only exist because we force them to exist via government policy. Rural areas have existed since the invention of agriculture in prehistory. Urban areas existed for at least 10,000 years. But suburbs? Car-dependent suburbs didn't exist until roughly the 1940s. Note that that's not the 1900s as a consequence of the invention of the automobile; it existed for decades without causing car-dependency. It wasn't until entities like Standard Oil and GM, along with misguided utopian planners like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright (who presumably didn't realize how badly they were fucking up), managed to convince the Federal government to essentially force car-dependency via things like FHA lending requirements and massive road subsidies that the suburbs as we know them really took off.

As for "culture:" people think all those millions of single-family houses everywhere exist because "that's what people want" and the "Free Market" makes it happen, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Single-family homes are, in a sense, subsidized by the zoning code. It holds down property values by eliminating competition from developers who would build out the lot to its highest and best use given market demand and instead lets single-family home buyers compete only amongst themselves. The macroeconomic result is that makes dense development more expensive than it should be and makes single-family houses cheaper than they should be (but still too expensive for a lot of people to actually afford, since overall supply is so restricted by the massive inefficient use of land). It also forces quite a lot of people to either buy or rent single-family houses, when they actually wanted (or would have wanted, if prices weren't skewed to make houses look unnaturally favorable) a unit in a multifamily building instead. Besides, "what do people want" is not the right question to begin with; the right question is "what do people deserve." Are you really going to argue that relatively wealthy people who can afford to buy single-family houses deserve a subsidy at (generally less-wealthy) renters' expense?! 'Cause that's what restrictive zoning gets you!

Of course, not being "natural" isn't a problem in and of itself, and unjust subsidies are a viable (albeit evil) policy choice. The real problem is that the suburbs also aren't sustainable -- and I don't just mean they aren't ecologically sustainable; I mean they aren't even economically sustainable! Generally speaking, suburbs do not produce enough tax revenue per acre to build and maintain the amount of infrastructure per acre that they require. (To understand what I mean, a concrete example might help: say you've got an apartment building with 100 feet of street frontage and 20 units. The occupants of each unit need to pay enough taxes to maintain 5 feet of street. But if you've got a single-family house on that lot instead, the occupants need to pay enough tax to maintain the entire 100 feet of street -- but of course, they can't afford that unless the house in question is a damn mansion.) In fact, the suburbs are both subsidized by the densely-developed areas of the jurisdiction they're in -- a subsidy that's on top of the zoning-induced subsidy I explained in the previous paragraph, by the way -- and a Ponzi scheme that causes jurisdictions without large densely-developed ares to go bankrupt once the wave of greenfield development moves out past their borders.

This has to be fixed -- we literally can't afford not to, in a way even more direct and immediate than climate change. And electric cars do absolutely fuck-all to help with it. In fact, in this sense electric cars are worse than useless: they're a red-herring that deludes people into thinking suburbs are less of an eminently nonviable catastrophe than they actually are. When you combine the fact that ending car dependency is better for the environment than electric cars with the fact that ending car dependency is better for solving literally every other major problem we have, from housing affordability, to crime, to poverty, to homelessness, to obesity, to even mental health, social cohesion and civic engagement than electric cars (which, again, do fuck-all to help any of it), it should become really fucking obvious which solution is the one we should be -- which one we have to be -- focusing on!