I agree that not everyone will want to live in small apartments. And not everyone has to, they can decide what tradeoffs are right for them. If they want a big

I agree that not everyone will want to live in small apartments. And not everyone has to, they can decide what tradeoffs are right for them. If they want a big house with a yard and they're fine commuting 1.5 hours to work across perpetually jammed bridges, that's still an option. I live in the SF Bay Area, and I've spent a decent amount of time studying this problem. These debates are raging in the city council meetings, with homeowner groups fighting against city councils who were elected on a platform of trying to get more apartments built. I agree that job vs. housing density disparity is the cause of many of the problems. The way you fix the disparity is that you boost the housing density - you upzone near transit (SB 50 in the CA state legislature is trying to do this across the state), you increase property tax rates to discourage people from waiting for the land to appreciate without doing anything useful with it (ideally by gradually phasing out prop 13), and you streamline the redevelopment process by making it such that if you comply with a clear set of rules, you can start building with the knowledge that homeowners associations won't bog you down in endless lawsuits. And in my dreams, you change the zoning to mixed use commercial/residential so that you can colocate offices, restaurants, stores, and residential, making everything way more walkable and easing the burden on road infrastructure.