What about parking, traffic, water, sewers, electricity usage, etc? You are now putting 6x the amount strain on the public infrastructure in that single area. Building more buildings is the naive, first order solution.

What about them? Is it no longer possible for America to build public infrastructure? Have we just given up?

Sure upgrading infrastructure is possible but the costs are huge. It's subject the same inflation as everything else, plus city worker unions have a lot of political power. Once a sewer line reaches capacity we can't do a minor increase; the whole thing has to be ripped out and replaced which is tremendously disruptive.

A real-world example to support your comment that my civil engineer buddy recently told me: in Columbus, one of the main streets past Ohio State University into downtown is completely at sewage/rain water capacity. Decades ago when the street in question (High St) was being built, the only buildinga along it were single/multi-family homes. Now there are large student dorms and apartment complexes. During intense thunderstorms, the gutters along the street which feed the sewage system reach capacity and the whole street floods. And I mean floods.

This is an "easy" fix in theory: gut the previous system and just build anew. The problem is, that would be such an enormous undertaking (b/c you have to divert sewage during the whole process, etc) that the city is effectively forced to apply what amounts to band-aid fixes in its place.

Yeah but if you live in a detached house that will no longer get any sun in its backyard when the six-story building goes up, you too are most likely going to be down at City Hall or wherever one goes, fighting against this one six-story building, even if you're a well-known advocate for taller buildings. Because it's My Back Yard, right?

It's definitely not win-win if that shadow falls on your beloved back yard, ruining your legal cannabis plot. Or if you live in the top floor of the five-story building that was built prior and your view will now be of the six-story building.

NIMBY works ("works") because most people put their own specific self interest before community when the former is threatened. They do this pretty reliably, and on the individual level it's usually pretty rational.

(Also, I might have reasons other than economics to keep my 1500 sq ft house from being torn down.)

There’s no reason the guy with the cannabis plot shouldn’t be outvoted by all the people that will benefit from the new building. The issue there is some combination of a collective action problem and what amounts to corruption.

The answer, as mentioned, is go to a higher level of government where there are even more people to outvote Mr. “But Muh Views”.

In the case of CA there’s seven million people in the Bay Area and 33 million in the rest of the state that would benefit from continued growth there and don’t care at all about shaded backyards in Palo Alto. That sounds like a referendum waiting to happen to me.

I agree the cannabis-plot guy could (maybe should) get out-voted, but I'm pretty skeptical it could happen by doing a ballot proposition.

That would come up against the same forces that fuel NIMBY-ism, i.e. the relative political clout of home owners and the power of the story that it's my back yard today, but it's gonna be YOUR back yard in the next shadow.