That won't always help. Look at Bay Area. Best value and economic return would be investment banks and tech companies. And then people would start complaining o

That won't always help. Look at Bay Area. Best value and economic return would be investment banks and tech companies. And then people would start complaining of even more gentrification. The metric governments should be aiming for is making cities MORE affordable than e.g. suburbs. Cities can offer a higher quality of life (in the sense of easy access to food and transportation) due to higher productivity and scale. Home ownership should be priority and subsized (apartments aren't that expensive to build at scale if you are willing to go prefab and pull in workers from Mexico.) Also, aesthetics complaints need to be disregarded. Most cities would end up looking like Seattle and New York anyways, complaining about tall buildings is just short sighted. Trying to have both economic benefits of a dense population and a "pretty" (i.e. rustic-looking small town hippie style architecture) is just not feasible on a large scale. Sure you can have a few pockets here and there but making it the central tenet of your urban planning will just cause more homelessness. You can't both have your cake and eat it too.