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Notes -
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.)
Another issue with increased density: does it actually help affordability long term? That is the reason we want density, right? When you add lanes to a highway, traffic gets better. For a while. Then people get used to the light traffic and change where they live (i.e., further away from town). Then traffic gets bad again. Who's to say that NYC will always be "unaffordable" no matter how dense it is? What if there's no bottom to the demand to live in NYC? What then?
Empirically, yes. You still have to pay to live somewhere, so induced demand is limited by price. We rarely charge for driving on roads. If we did that, the long-run elasticity wouldn't be so close to 1, but also we wouldn't have to build new roads in the first place, or at least not as many: We could use congestion pricing to limit traffic.
The ability to add more housing capacity is also much larger. Over time, you can slowly convert single-family areas to include townhomes or duplexes, then lowrises, then midrises, and all the way up to highrises if the demand is there. That's easily a 20-fold increase in density, if not more. But building up is much more difficult with roads--it's not really reasonable, if your 3 lane highway is congested, to build 30 more lanes, whether they're on the side or above.
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