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Notes -
The number of people who currently live in NYC is more than double the entire population of the country at independence. I don't mean to be flippant, but every major city now was once tiny. The process of urbanization is centuries old. The US is lucky in that unlike Ireland (or the UK, or France) economic growth is pretty dispersed between several major urban areas, all of which could attract new internal migrants. Obviously there are big policy challenges (see the issues discussed in the infrastructure comment today elsewhere), but sure, I don't see the issue with NYC becoming as populous as, say, Tokyo.
Building more homes where the economic activity is tends to be more viable than trying to artificially disperse economic activity to where the homes are, which as far as I know has mostly been a huge failure historically.
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