here is the problem: single family homes have now been financialized--the corporations have invested in them and will want to maintain the increase in home prices...therefore corporations will do what they have always done to increase the value of their assets--they will buy politicians and get the politicians to pass laws to keep home prices up...such as? Ok, such as passing state and federal laws that make home building more expensive, time consuming and costly...more strict environmental regulations are the most likely tool to be used by the corporations & politicians to suppress the supply of new homes...

I have been in real estate development for quite a few years, and opponents to more housing are never corporations. It is always individual home owners who do not want multi unit housing or smaller housing in their neighborhood (i.e. poorer people) or do not want roads to get more congested, etc. Not once have I seen an agent of a corporation come to a city council meeting and protest against rezoning land for more housing.

the corporations go to the politicians and pay them money. The politicians then pass laws that make it harder to build housing. Thus supply is restricted.

> single family homes have now been financialized--the corporations have invested in them

Single family homes have been financialized for decades, well before corporations started investing in them. And corporations own less than 1% of the single family housing, so not enough to make a difference.

> they will buy politicians and get the politicians to pass laws to keep home prices up

Politicians aren't listening to corporations when they pass laws to keep home prices up and keep supply down; they're listening to the "average homeowner", because that's the much bigger political bloc (> 50% in many cities), compared to a few corporations. If corporations had much influence, we'd have a lot more construction years ago when corporations didn't own many SFH, since many (like developers) do want more construction.

Or tell people no, and be happy with a place that works. Eventually people will leave when they can't be there.

The option of "growing to meet exponential need" rarely, if ever, actually works in the end. By works i mean "leads to an equilibrium that actually is any good"

Usually what happens is people push on creating housing, and think once they've done it, the rest will take care of itself. This is the easy part. The rest is much worse - now you have more people! The density and scale of population will increase until the local governments/etc fail hard enough at providing services, which often happens quicker than one would expect. Being effective at providing public transportation/police/fire/schools/health/etc in a dense, populous area is much harder and more expensive than often seems thought. Especially if you haven't been planning to do it for 50 years and setting yourself up for it. It also requires ever more careful planning as it grows (in how land is laid out, etc), and you will hit tons of problems anyway. For a random example: When your police/fire grows large enough, it ends up with lots of political power of its own.

It's also much harder for governments to stay efficient in spending at all as they grow, making services/etc even more expensive to provide. The places that i knew that were successful at becoming denser were willing to admit this. The ones that were not, often pretend they will make it back in increased taxes on their own, but they never did (and often end up in cycles of tax increase/drops/etc until the infrastructure fails)

Once you are forced to raise taxes/bonds/etc, you end up with a whole host of practical problems (politicians winning on short-term-lower-taxes-long-term-destruction platforms)

This is just a sampling. Overall, it's like scaling anything human. Having a team of 10 works really well. Having a team of 1000 is really hard.

Lots of cities that go down this path end up as basically tax revenue Ponzi schemes - they have to keep growing because they need to keep borrowing against the ever-more-expensive future

In the end, it simply isn't unreasonable for cities to not want to play the game, and to be happy with sustainable size, services, and tax revenue, even if it makes things unhappy for others who want to join in.

Thankfully population growth is slowing down, and we are below replacement rate right now.

If an economy is booming in an area, and people keep trying to move there, that's a sign that the metro is doing something right, and that it's desirable.

Forcing the government to get in the way and tell people not to go where they want to go is stupid and exclusionary. It's "I'm in, now shut the gates on everyone else".

Like, how is indulging NIMBY attitudes useful or productive at all? It means less freedom for people to live where they want to live, it means higher housing prices that strain people's budgets, it means it's harder for businesses to grow and be productive, and it usually means more suburban sprawl that destroys the environment.

"If an economy is booming in an area, and people keep trying to move there, that's a sign that the metro is doing something right, and that it's desirable. "

The latter is true, the former is not necessarily. It's like saying "if a company succeeds, they are doing something right". It's never that simple, and lots of things that are not controlled by the company or city (we'll just sum them all up as "luck") play a serious factor.

"Forcing the government to get in the way and tell people not to go where they want to go is stupid and exclusionary. It's "I'm in, now shut the gates on everyone else".

Again, the former is false, the latter is true. You have this backwards - the governments aren't telling anyone anything. They are trying to maintain what they have, at a scale they can do. They are being forced to scale in ways they don't want and don't think they can make work instead.

Keep in mind your latter is applicable to other situations as well. "US/China/etc got big by horribly abusing the environment, but nobody else should be allowed to do it". They are in, now shut the gates on everyone else is literally true there. Nobody argues this is the wrong answer, which is the point. Shutting the gates, often portrayed negatively in this situation, is not necessarily the wrong answer to situations at all!

Beyond that, framing it this way is just odd. Managing and keeping a place of 10,000 in working order, and effectively serving the population, is not at all the same as 100,000. It's not 10 times harder, it's 100 times harder.

Why should cities be forced to do it, just because of the preferences, mainly of people who do not live there now? Why do they have to value future potential citizens over current ones?

The rest of your claims feel like a lack of perspective and judging others. It's a portraying of things as only two possible extremes, and saying one extreme (the denser one) is good. I'm actually suggesting cities and their citizens should decide how far and how fast they want to grow, based on what they want out of life. This will lead to some dense places, some not.

Yes, that means less freedom for people who don't live somewhere to choose to live somewhere. It often means higher housing prices for people who don't already live somewhere to live somewhere. The cost for people already in a given place reaches equilibrium on its own.

It usually trades those things for the happiness of people already there. You can do this if you want, but pretending it's the "obvious right thing to do" makes no sense, and forcing cities to do it, even less.

It also assumes all the things you want succeed at their objectives, which is really rare. Complex systems like this are never that easy to get to behave how you want.

It doesn't at all mean it's harder for businesses to grow (that's just silly), and the suburban sprawl is also sort of silly - there are lots of dense, environment destroying places. It's also orthogonal - you have the same problem either way, because realistically, densifying only works to a point anyway. If you make somewhere 5x as dense, and 5x the people go there, now what? You think you won't end up with the same problems, but with 5x the population?

(As i argue, you will actually end up with 20-100x the problem, and 5x the population)

People have always found ways to be more consumptive, no matter what the density. The faith that density is a solution to overconsumption, under the assumption you will be more efficient in a dense environment (and won't increase the consumption) seems highly misplaced.

I would wager if we really get to the density some folks want, we are pretty screwed as a planet. We will make all of the problems much harder than they are now, and have less will and ability to solve them.

In practice - population growth is the thing that drives housing prices, and the environmental issues you cite.

Raising housing prices lower population growth, and vice versa. See, e.g.:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...

You can see for every 1% of population growth, housing prices go up 1.4%

Notably, it turns out this is true even in dense places, so it's not just "they aren't densifying".

I can cite you similar papers showing the raising housing prices lowers population growth.

You want slower population growth, not higher, if you want to solve environmental issues, most of which stem from having too many people.

In practice, the raising house prices, while painful for freedom to live, helps ensure a sane equilibrium for the cities and the population. There is always pain in that, no matter what you do. Destroying that equilibrium seems unlikely to have the only-positive effects that folks seem to think. We already know this is true of almost all other things in nature (IE destroying the annoying mosquitoes would be bad), and i'm totally stymied why people think it will not happen here.

So there you go, this is why "indulging in NIMBY attitudes" as you call it can be helpful and productive, even if you ignore the actual "happiness of people" issue that pervades the debate. In the end, i'd urge you to see that not everyone who thinks forced densification is a bad thing is an idiot, or doesn't understand the costs/benefits. They may just think you are wrong whether it's going to succeed or be worth it.