These people don't have cars, they are the least well off people in our society, often physically, mentally and materially. Their entire support system, friends, family etc. are ripped up from beneath them. They end up never rejoining the economy and the cycle continues.
These are people so we can't just shift them where we want to.
Here's an example from Zone 1:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/residents-of-the-heyg...
These people OWNED their flats, they were compulsory purchased from them at ridiculously low rates, demolished and replaced with luxury flats. The only option for these people was to move from their 2 bed flat to a new studio or leave London.
It's just that they've now become desirable locations.
Continuing to move people out whenever an area becomes desirable is a deeply anti-social and very much temporary solution, and creates the new issue of dealing with the fact that a lot of the jobs are in the centre and a lot of the people who need this housing can't afford to get to them if they need anything more expensive than a bus pass.
This flat is in Victoria which is quite central in London. I would expect you could provide more social housing at the same cost in some of the outer zones. There is obviously a trade off where the increased amount of housing from going further out is not worth the inconvenience to the occupants. However, I would expect this trade off kicks in well outside of zone 1.
For the sake of argument let's assume you could double the zone 1 social housing by moving it to zone 2/3. That seems like a pretty big failure in policy.