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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
In America, there is no unmet demand for dense housing. There's merely unmet demand to live in New York.
The supply is there. There's plenty of dense, non-car housing available in America. Nearly every dense, pre-car city in America has either grown more slowly or outright lost population, and the fasting growing cities are car-centered ones [1]. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Baltimore were all built before the car, and there are millions of high-density transit-oriented housing units available for nearly nothing.
Perhaps you don't like legacy cities. A dirty truth about America is that local governments are essentially owned by the local developers. Large developers are completely unconstrained by existing zoning laws. If it's brownfield, they get the code changed, and if it's greenfield, they write the codes themselves. America builds over a million new units per year. DR Horton, Lennar, etc. will build whatever makes money and buy whatever politician is necessary to do so, and all they crank out is a million+ SFR units per year, with a sideline five-over-one Texas Donuts. Give a developer an entire city, and they'll create Irvine and The Woodlands, not a mini-Portland (Donald Bren and Donald Horton could easily afford to do so, if they thought it would be profitable)
Let's finally watch people reveal their preferences. Work from home decoupled housing from jobs, allowing people to move to where they actually want, not just where their jobs are. There was no huge urban boom as people packed up their suburban lives to finally move into the city of their dreams. The opposite happened. People poured out of the cities and into the exurbs, and small towns everywhere have been overwhelmed.
I have nothing against cities. It's fun to be young, single, and mildly intoxicated in a city. It's fun to be an empty nester in a city.
Suburbs and small towns are designed for kids. When my kids were small, they could walk to the local park a few blocks away. When they were bigger, they could bike to the grocery store to buy ice cream. Now I drop them off at school in a car, but this is only because of sporting gear. This seems better than moving to a dense, walk-able neighborhood, and have my kid walk through dense masses of whores, addicts, thieves, bums, and lunatics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_in_the_United_States_by_decade
How do you explain why places like Silicon Valley, with extremely high rents and very low density, don't increase in density? I'm sure developers would love to build high rises there, but they don't. How do you explain ridiculous things in California's building code like the requirement to make new houses ready for the installation of solar panels?
I'm not familiar with the US real estate development industry as I am with Canada's, but from what I hear, they have very similar problems, and in Canada, there are a lot of serious barriers to development, granted that housing here is much more expensive than it is in the US. Permits require an enormous amount of paperwork and take years to get. Zoning by-laws prohibit dense development in most areas. Highly restrictive building codes make new housing unnecessarily expensive.
California is a petri dish as to why progressive policy is incredibly stupid and counter-intuitive. In short, there is an entire class of activist rent-seekers whose job is to extract concessions from any new development, no matter how ruinous or stupid it may be. It is a kafkaesque gong show which even the schlerotic Soviet bureaucracy would compare well to. Imagine that in order to improve or change anything in California, you have a librum veto of which anyone can cancel the whole project. But instead of a congress of corrupt noblemen, you have a collection of junkies, homeless people, and rich white liberals - all of which despise each other but unified in hatred of you, who has the audacity to attempt to turn a decrepit coin laundry into an apartment block.
It is a miracle, frankly, that anything in California is built at all.
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