Part of the issue is that for decades sprawl was preferred by many people and development followed this path while many more dense areas suffered from neglect.

Part of the issue is that for decades sprawl was preferred by many people and development followed this path while many more dense areas suffered from neglect. Now there's been a strong shift towards density, but the amount of people who want to live in dense areas is greater than the amount of desirable dense areas available. At least around here, I've noticed that developers in the (often cheaper) suburbs are making a push towards building high-density walkable devevolopments. It's worth noting that in many cities, there are still a lot of affordable options (some even cheaper than a few decades ago), but they're often not in the hip areas that people want to live. When people talk about how unfair it is that others got good values in the hip areas, they often don't realize that those areas were once the cheap undesirable areas.