Communities of millionaires extracting ever-greater home equity windfalls from the lifetime productivity of young adults trying to establish their lives in the area are unsympathetic characters behaving badly. It is great when entities from outside these little circles of defection-against-society can disrupt them. Even more so when profits can be redirected from extractive activities (owning land) to productive ones (creating homes).

Not only do urban uses generate more property taxes, the services they require cost much less per taxpayer to provide. We have an entire country of suburban sprawl. Those few places dense enough that their connective tissue is reasonably called a community, rather than a car sewer, are ruinously expensive because they are under extreme demand.

All types of built environments are essential to a country as diverse and dynamic as the United States. And the way we make built environments in this country is, you betcha, capitalism. This postwar obsession of ours with hyper-local veto power unreasonably arrests every village at the village stage. All our great cities were villages once, and they surely contained some stakeholders who opposed what happened next. Should we have never built a city? If it is right for New York to exist, why is it wrong for the next New York to emerge?