Land is not fungible, you can't exchance an acre of downtown Vancouver for an acre in a rural area. Nobody would ever confuse the two when it comes to economics!
Land value is all about access, about who is near by, about what natural resources are near by. When real estate prices go up without construction, land value is increasing.
In the US, restrictive zoning limits workers from moving into predictive areas and being able to use their labor for more predictive ends. This has been a tremendous drag on our GDP, while simultaneously concentrating wealth into the unproductive hands of landowners.
The first paper to point this out made big errors, leading to an underestimate of this effect:
https://www.econlib.org/a-correction-on-housing-regulation/
This is the difference between gains from land use and gains from the stock market: one reduces overall wealth and concentrates wealth to those with the most; stock market investing does the opposite.
I am in no way saying that burdensome regulation has artificially limited the growth of existing metro areas and caused a bubble driven by artificial scarcity but the idea that there's nowhere to invest in at the ground floor where it's cheap is absurd. This happens in cities on a smaller scale already. The nice areas are too expensive so young artsy people move where its cheap, make it better, and then it becomes a good area -- repeat.
If you invested in the development of say, Akron Ohio with the goal of tipping the scales and starting flywheel of metropolitan growth and your bet pays off not only will you be filthy filthy rich but you'll create brand new economic activity and real growth. Of course fighting over the same 100 sq miles is a zero sum game.
As an individual laborer your choices are obviously limited to where you can find work but as an investor the sky is the limit.
SF billionaires seem to be thinking along the same lines. If it worked for Las Vegas, perhaps they can make it work for a brand new SF-adjacent town.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-s...