It's true that the people are getting what they're voting for, but I wouldn't call this "not a failure of democracy", when the voters are causing their society to decay and die slowly because of their own short-sightedness.

However, we haven't exactly seen better systems of governance, plus not all democratic societies are filled with such short-sighted idiots like we see in the US, and those societies are doing much better long-term and stability-wise.

How is this short-sightedness? Voters are voting for what's best for them, and it is indeed best for them. There are only two ways of fixing it: cancel democracy (in a dictatorship no one gives a damn about what people want, and developers make max profit by building everything they want), or cancel market economy, so the housing can't be sold or bought and the Party distributes it as it sees fit. Both looks to me worse than what we have today.

Nice false dichotomy you got there.