People living near city centers are perfectly content with apartment buildings, which have no real upper limit on how many people will fit into a given plot of land.

It sure would be nice if they voted and engaged with local government processes as if that were true!

> large plots of land

This assumption that you've smuggled in begs the entire question

Isn't that the american dream? Owning a nice house with large living spaces for a complete family, amenities such as pools and outdoor areas, garage with at least two cars?

There's a reason people living in small standardized modular pods in extremely dense skyscrapers is a staple of cyberpunk dystopias.

As the perfect complement to the parent comment, you're conveniently ignoring the qualifier "close to the city center". No part of the American dream has ever claimed the suburban paradise to be in the middle of Manhattan. It's a contradiction by definition.

To go on a bit of a tangent, this is what bugs me so much about the housing conversation. People take fragments of thoughts and stitch them together into belief systems that are trivially incoherent. I'd be happy to live and let live if these people didn't also vote....

Close to the whole problem is that “city center” the development pattern ends at very short radius from the center in most metro areas (New York excepted), while “close to city center” the geographical fact continues on for several more miles that are currently developed as the suburban dream.

Most cities have a downtown core, and even some high-density housing in that downtown core, but so little of it that you can walk the whole thing in a few minutes.

Hah, as the others said such a silly premise.

Only higher wages make it possible to have taller apartments in some idealized frictionless capitalist system!

(In the real world, we can and should build taller not matter what, but certainly unionization doesn't hurt with this.)