Distance costs money or time (basically the same thing at the macro level). When you have things spread out people need to eat the large opportunity cost of forgoing jobs or other opportunities that are far away or spent a lot of time and money commuting. If cities prioritized making it easy to commute in and out that would make distance cost less, effectively the same as increasing density. The problem is that there's many decades of pent up demand for both housing and transit infrastructure. There's no cheap way out of the situation. It's going to take a hell of a lot of either/both in order to measurably improve people's quality of life.

Instead of trying to put cheap homes where the jobs are, we could also try to put jobs where the cheap homes are. People constantly talk about the former, but I almost never see people talk about the latter.

The former problem is much easier than the latter. In order to accomplish it we just need to governments to stop actively blocking it from happening. We have no idea where to even begin with the latter. The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.

> The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.

You're such an optimist. Governments around the world have been trying to relocate employment and labor for centuries and the best they have come up with is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've talked about it, but I seem to be the only one...

In any new suburb or city you are not allowed to put jobs where the people are. There is exactly one house within comfortable walking distance of my office: the farmhouse that was here before the area was developed. If I bought a lot in this office park I would not be allowed to put apartments or houses. A couple miles away there are lots of houses, I wouldn't be allowed to buy a few and put in an office. A few miles in a different direction is a shopping mall that is failing. If I bought the mall I wouldn't be allowed to rent space for offices or apartments without first doing a zoning change, and then I'd have to choose either apartments or office, I wouldn't be allowed to put a house in the parking lot that is bigger than either apartments or offices would need.

Jobs that require "facetime" can't do that. The only ones that can are remote work. I'm in favor, but most companies resist even when feasible.

Not to mention a city is more than housing. It's nice to walk to the corner pub, go to a theatre, sporting event, etc.

Homes are cheap by definition because not enough people want them in the area. The closest thing we have to that is the Military Industrial Complex and setting up locations to ensure votes. They have the most influence per dollar by going to areas which have fewer other jobs.