Everything I said is not true of Chicago. Chicago has not underbuilt housing for almost a century.

When prices start to diverge from the 70s to today - Chicago's metro population grows from 7M to 8.9M (27%) [1].

NYC metro population grows from 18.3 to 19.8M (8%) [2].

It's harder for NYC to under-build for a century when the population has not grown as much. Chicago isn't exactly a developer's utopia...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22956/chicago/population

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/states/new-york/population

If you isolate just the city - NYC does grow from 7.8M to 8.8M (12%). Manhattan goes from 1.54M to 1.69M (9%).

Chicago's downtown population growth is >40%.

This is pretty far afield at this point, but while Chicago may not be a developer's paradise, it's substantially better than New York.

In any case, though, the original question is whether population density actually makes a place less desirable. The mere fact that Chicago is not cheap (not simply inexpensive, but actually cheap) contradicts the claim that population density is something people don't want.

People want opportunity. Opportunity comes with density.

They don't want density for the sake of density.

NYC has better opportunities - that's why it's denser. It's not denser because it's more desirable, and then it just so happens that it also has opportunity.

This is true for Shenzhen and Beijing and Mexico City and Paris and London and Mumbai and every major city.

I'm not sure we're really disagreeing at this point. Density has a bunch of effects. It creates congestion. But it also creates opportunity. Without the people in New York, there would not be opportunity there. People _wish_ their front door led to downtown Manhattan, and their backdoor led to 100 pristine acres in rural Montana. What people _want_ is what they pay for. And that is to live in places with big network effects, which require large populations.