Then what is the answer? People want to live in NYC, LA and the Bay Area. They need homes in the places they want to live, and if they don't get them they won't stay put: they'll move to sprawl in New Jersey, Orange County and Livermore. And those places will suck, and we'll all pay the costs in infrastructure stress.

Build housing where the jobs are. That absolutely is the answer. Any other solution is isomorphic to "put the desirable jobs somewhere else", a puzzle the whole world[1] is trying to solve, and failing. Housing is something we know how to do.

[1] Except for the handful of desirable cities.