Housing demand, despite what NIMBYs might think in the Bay Area, is not infinite at any price point. Eventually all the people that want to live in an area do live in that area and equilibrium is reached. For much of human history, that is how the entire world operated - there were no zoning codes constraining the ability of developers to build buildings for those with the money to afford them, and the king would almost never find reason to deny permits - more people in more central location meant more trade skill labor which was much more easily taxed than subsistence farmers.
You build for density until you hit the actual physical limits on density, and then you have a claim to the infeasibility of housing everyone where they want to be. We are so radically far away from such a threshold it is laughable, in much the same way some purport our understanding of the universe is nearly complete, or that we have near total mastery of our planet - neither are remotely close to happening and are just hubris on the part of those who can't comprehend how much more there is left to do.
We could have cities hundreds of stories high, entire populations housed in glass pyramids taller than Everest, population densities in excess of a hundred thousand per mile. And that doesn't need to imply poverty, squalor, or suffering - we are fully capable of building dense well. It is an independent knob of consideration that only shows correlation today because of cultural motivations and social pressure to make dense housing suck to punish the poor because only the poor live in dense housing because dense housing sucks.
You build for density until you hit the actual physical limits on density, and then you have a claim to the infeasibility of housing everyone where they want to be. We are so radically far away from such a threshold it is laughable, in much the same way some purport our understanding of the universe is nearly complete, or that we have near total mastery of our planet - neither are remotely close to happening and are just hubris on the part of those who can't comprehend how much more there is left to do.
We could have cities hundreds of stories high, entire populations housed in glass pyramids taller than Everest, population densities in excess of a hundred thousand per mile. And that doesn't need to imply poverty, squalor, or suffering - we are fully capable of building dense well. It is an independent knob of consideration that only shows correlation today because of cultural motivations and social pressure to make dense housing suck to punish the poor because only the poor live in dense housing because dense housing sucks.