It has been pointed out previously that BART's infrastructure was totally reasonable...for the original level of growth the city assumed it would face. Meanwhile, SF's actual population growth has exceeded that to a considerable degree.

As an Austinite, I was going to comment that our housing has grown dramatically, but our transit infrastructure has not.

Having to commute from the outskirts isn't nearly so bad if the infrastructure supports it, but you have to build transit for where your city will be in ten years, not where it is now, and we're barely even doing the latter in Austin.

Austin, short of a smart coordinated approach to transit, is going to become no different than Seattle or SF. Eventually it’s going to need subways. Lucky for Austin it’s all limestone down below and the city is far from overbuilt, yet.

I don't think YIMBYs paper over this issue at all. Their views tend to go hand-in-hand with advocacy for public transit, parks, and various other community services. Their plans often involve crafting more "walkable" downtowns, where you bring dense housing closer to commercial districts, and make areas easier to travel to by foot.

That's nice, but only deals with people-moving, not any of the other infrastructure burdens of higher density. So, yes, by ignoring most of the issue while addressing a tiny corner, YIMBY’s are exactly papering over the issue.

People specifically mentioned transit as something that’s ignored and that’s simply not the case.

This is why I dislike “Steelmanning” arguments since nobody spends the time to research the opposition and just better articulates strawmen.

I’m not a member of the hyper logical brain geniuses society that eats this stuff up, but if you want to zero in on stuff YIMBYs are weak on consider ableism, school crowding and (If applicable to a region) water availability.

Higher density would obviously put much more pressure on local governments to build the necessary infrastructure and it’d increase their tax revenue to fund these projects.

The evidence needed to assess the probability of that outcome can be found in New York City.

Didn't they sell control of the MTA to the state?

In the past ten years Boston's traffic has literally gotten twice as bad. Governor Baker thinks the MBTA's budget woes are because it serves too many places (and it poorly serves various areas of the city and the metro area). You tell me how well this squares up with your claim.

In theory.

Chicken and egg. If you built the infrastructure beforehand, land prices would skyrocket because of increased amenity and then you'd have both excessive costs building in more density along with many people who paid top dollar for a "nice" suburb now losing out badly from planning decisions.

Long term planning that is set in stone would solve this problem, but doubt it's politically feasible in many places.

The same people who don't want apartments also don't want infrastructure. If you want the political support for transit to exist, you have to have people voting who live in apartments, which means you need to build apartments.

An underappreciated source of the bay area's problems is that its enormous immigrant population cannot vote for 10+ years after they arrive, so the people who didn't want it to change have all the political power.