A more direct example - if people have to live in McSprawlsBurg and commute an hour each way every day to work in NIMBYville highways and endless leagues of sin

A more direct example - if people have to live in McSprawlsBurg and commute an hour each way every day to work in NIMBYville highways and endless leagues of single family copy pasted houses will be built to accommodate job demand in that city, and you will get ludicrous amounts of traffic. If NIMBYville stops being awful and recognizes how high the land values are they dezone the city limits to enable substantially higher density. And then, a decade later after the demand bubble has been drained, you might finally have the workers living in the actual city they work in, commuting by train, bike, tram, walking, etc instead of with cars that, unless you go out of your way to subsidize, will be prohibitively expensive to own when the square footage land value is so high. And everyone wins in that world. If you previously owned an upzoned house developers will buy your house for more than they would if it were just zoned for a single family dwelling because they can put a dozen+ apartments on it. Letting density happen would mean you can actually choose between a small inner city condo or apartment that dosen't cost a magnitude more than a several thousand square foot house fifty miles away because when housing demand happens in the city housing can actually be built to meet it. It is all wrapped up in short sighted greed on the part of everyone involved. Nothing gets better because nobody wants to wait for the best outcome if they can make marginal victories by sacrificing the well being of the whole and even their own long term prospects in the immediate term.