That first scenario you portray is economic growth. Any city in the country would be thrilled to have to deal with the "problem" of being too attractive to both businesses and people.
Yes. The city is thrilled. Jobs! Tax dollars! Wooo!
The people who live there? Maybe not so much.
Is infinite growth desirable? Should we make policy decisions to distribute things more instead?
Compare Dallas with LA. The denser one is much more expensive. Maybe get denser, like Manhattan? Oops, still expensive. Manhattan just needed to build that much more and get even denser? Where exactly is it believed it would stop? That the growth machine would say 'ok, that's enough, now we will just start lowering prices!'?
Yet Dallas-the-city wants to get those businesses - and will crow for days about being more "business friendly" or brag about this or that company moving to Dallas - but Dallas-the-incumbent-residents don't like the influx of people who can out-spend them for housing.
There are a few places that understand the less-direct effect of feeding the infinite-economic-growth-business-machine, that zone for overall stability, to prevent big industrial/corporate development, not just to prevent housing. But for that to work they generally need to have something well-established to rest their hat on instead, to avoid drying up and drying out.
Cities are composed of people. Obviously, it doesn't make any sense to say that a city wants something that its people do not want.
The people in a city want businesses because they want good jobs and services to be available to them. Homeowners (the majority of the residents in most American cities) especially want that influx because the newcomers drive up their property values.
So yes, the people of Dallas, on average, really do want those businesses and newcomers
> Obviously, it doesn't make any sense to say that a city wants something that its people do not want.
Is it really so obvious? So many policies are implemented by government that people as a majority do not want like wars and tax cuts for the wealthy or not implemented by government that people as a majority do want like healthcare or rational immigration policy. The idea that the representatives of the people are acting in the people’s interest is quite naïve to be honest.
Dallas is less expensive than LA. LA with amazing weather, little allergens, and beautiful geography. Dallas with heat and cold enough to be lethal, brutal allergens, and limited natural beauty. No one who knows better wants to live in Dallas- they have to live in Dallas because they can’t afford it elsewhere. Which works out, because Dallas has infinite land to build single family homes. When people move to Dallas they aren’t moving to Dallas; they’re moving 30 miles from the urban core. Dallas’s urban core is decaying from lack of housing - with no affordable housing for young people near the city center - downtown has become a ghost town as jobs follow the housing to the out rings. The smattering of housing that exists near downtown are apartments, very expensive town homes for the wealthy, or the original stock of single family homes from the 50s.
When I lived in downtown Dallas, I would have loved more housing. Part of the reason we left was because it was a ghost town. Very little to walk and see. At night it was desolate and unsafe.
LA has been maxed out for housing for decades. They’re constrained by geography. They can only build up, but they haven’t… only recently started loosening housing restrictions to allow for density at the state level, but even that is a half measure. They need to just swallow the pill and let density be built anywhere. Yeah, change sucks, but at least we’ll stop forcing people to move to Dallas.
The businesses wouldn't go away. They would just move to less densely populated areas.
Businesses would perhaps take a small efficiency hit because of the reduced availability of labour in the region, but even this would probably be compensated for by better worker mobility, because businesses would be less crowded in the cities and there would be more labour available in the low-density areas.
Businesses would probably also be able to pay a little less as less income is tied up in housing costs. A restructuring of business and population distribution would probably not have that much impact on overall productivity, but it could shift the available money between income levels significantly. If less money goes to rich property owners, then more money stays with the average person.
