We used to build cities in America. Our grandparents' generation got brand new roads, brand new houses, brand new schools, etc. There is a concept of being at capacity, and there are areas that have reached that capacity, where the roads can comfortably carry X number of cars, where density is enough to support a local economy and industry, and the quality of life is good. Rather than trying to cram 5 pounds of crap into a 10 pound bag, building new cities in proximity to economic megalopolises (first as a crutch to support the population of the new city) with easy transportation between the two is something that California has a great track record of, for example, that you don't see in the Northeast. Irvine is a great semi-recent example of that. This is development done correctly, not cramming as many people into a mature area as possible, and then whining that NIBMYism makes living there expensive when the infrastructure of a city or region is at capacity.
And what happens when you can't build anymore, like on the island of Manhattan? You regulate rents to protect housing for the economically-diverse population of people who live there. This is all not that complicated, but all we hear about is this deregulation model that doesn't make any sense when you game it out two steps ahead.
>Rather than trying to cram 5 pounds of crap into a 10 pound bag
This is what you call living in high rises in cities like Manhattan or San Francisco?
>There is a concept of being at capacity
Capacity which tax policy has been designed to artificially throttle. It doesn't really matter if the market wants to build high rises 15 minutes from the offices in SF and people want to live in high rises 15 minutes from work if a stick in the mud lives there in a $6 million bungalow he inherited from his mom who bought it in 1974.
Obviously if he were taxed a bit higher for occupying valuable land he would sell up and leave and those apartments could be built. But, why not indulge the NIMBY desire to be "at capacity"? Those NIMBYs probably worked hard for that $6 million by buying in the 90s or by being pushed out of the vagina of somebody who did.
If you actually had experience living or working in Manhattan, you’d see that it has the infrastructure to enable density - namely, the country’s most intricate and heavily-used subway and transit system, by a mile. (17x the ridership compared to the next largest, Chicago.) But yeah, let’s build density without discussing how we rebuild cities with transit and how we pay for this multi-decade endeavor that will conservatively cost tens of billions per city. It’s almost like the half-baked “solution” of deregulation doesn’t actually make sense once you analyze it for five minutes, oh and it’s the preferred, and only, policy pushed hard by developers. Funny how that works.
And what happens when you can't build anymore, like on the island of Manhattan? You regulate rents to protect housing for the economically-diverse population of people who live there. This is all not that complicated, but all we hear about is this deregulation model that doesn't make any sense when you game it out two steps ahead.