That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.
If you want to live in a house, then yes, you will have to commute potentially far distances. But if you're willing to live in an apartment then you can still live in the core of the cities mentioned. This just makes sense, if everyone got to live in a house then it'd hardly have the density required to be considered a city anymore. And actually the existence of 45min away suburbs from the heart of the city is exactly the problem with post-WWII development, if anything you should pay a much heavier premium or live even further.
> Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals
The big problem with changes like this (which I support, btw) is that the changes get immediately reflected in land prices, which means that you basically can only put the maximum number of units on the land, which tends to increase prices.
If you build enough, this doesn't happen but I don't think any western urban area is anywhere close to that point.
I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.