https://archive.ph/37YG8

The article itself answers the question. The biggest thing is people move to cities because of the people already there. You've got a pretty supreme chicken and egg problem trying to bootstrap a new one from nothing. In the past when we still had a frontier, it was a fairly small number of people who set out for it, and it took decades if not centuries for some of those tiny outposts to eventually become cities, usually because trade needed to happen there and the outpost happened to be ideally positioned near natural routes for it.

As for construction in existing cities, I wish people could acknowledge it still takes more than just people willing to tolerate housing expansion. I personally don't even care about my average neighbor possibly becoming slightly poorer or even my own home value decreasing. I kind of do care about the quality of life hit from the construction itself. My neighborhood has actually been in a construction boom for over 7 years now, and that means roads constantly being closed, sidewalks being unavailable, ad hoc blockages, a fire every now and then, trash all over the place, a more or less constant cloud of dirt in the air and thin film covering the roads, sidewalks, my house, my car, my body if I'm outside for a few hours, my wife's car getting all tires flat within two months of moving here because of nails left in the road.

When people are opposed to this, it isn't universally because they're greedy misers who don't care about homelessness and only want to see their paper net worth get bigger. I don't even really personally care that much and am more than willing to put up with it or I wouldn't be here, but I'm not going to act like there are no tradeoffs, no downsides, no annoyances.

And I suppose it's impossible to know to what extent regulations are partially causing it, but it's not like the existing construction projects are always going all that smoothly. Even when they're allowed to build, builders seem to struggle, at least the urban builders. During the free money era, every mom and pop seemed to believe they were qualified to become home builders, and most of them are now out of business, but projects stagnated for years while they went through bankruptcy and slowly unloaded their properties. When they still had them, scheduling was a mess. Skilled trades have severe shortages and you can't complete a project without them. Laying new utility lines is inherently harder and more expensive when you have to do it through roads and properties already occupied and in use. I've watched these projects for years because they're happening right out in front of my window. The crews are out there using wooden crates with one side ripped off propped onto a forklift as a cherry picker. They're on 60 foot ladders without a harness leaning out three feet to the side to lay a dryer vent. When we moved in, we were the first owners of a new building. Three of six units had the furnaces upside down. Our roof had nails sticking out that weren't even covered. We come to find out the code inspector was 84 years old and was not walking up 4 flights of stairs to actually look at any of this stuff. Maybe the building regulations are excessive, but does it even matter if no one enforces them? Being able to operate like the wild west didn't seem to help our builder. He still went out of business within a few years and left six separate in-progress projects and empty lots he'd purchased abandoned. That was three years ago, and so far, they're still abandoned.

I don't doubt that NIMBYism and provincialism in local government are serious problems, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that even undoing that on its own will solve the problem and these builders will just magically become competent and three decades worth of sufficiently smart people who opted for college will instantly reskill to become electricians and plumbers instead.

As it stands, I talked to my builder's son about this years ago when he was charged with doing some remedial work for free because they'd laid the foundations wrong for our units and drift between that and the slab for the driveway was cutting our water main. He told me they couldn't hire decent crew almost no matter what they tried. Nobody wants to do urban work. It's inherently harder and less profitable than putting up endless cookie-cutter identical subdivisions on previously unoccupied land out in the sticks. Some of that is local opposition, but some of it is just you can't control the layout of the roads. You can't control what the adjacent lots are shaped like. You can't control how much land is even available. In principle, building a brand new city in the middle of nowhere is a solution to those problems, but it won't matter if no one wants to live there.