alt Hacker NewsExcept regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.
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...that's a pretty disingenuous take on zoning, which has many other motives beyond racism.
For example zoning keeps industry away from residential, preventing disasters like the West Texas Fertilizer explosion.
Zoning is about 100 years old, and it's not the reason Manhattan doesn't have enough groceries. And ultimately, market forces almost always win over regulations.
Reformulate the question: why do people tolerate living in dense tiny apartments, without easy access to necessities like childcare and grocery stores?
It's environmental as much as it is zoning that drives the development you see.
You literally can't build the kind of "concrete jungle" that you used to be able to because of environmental.
Like a store with a few parking spaces up front, the building and an alley around the back to one parking space (for the staff) and the dumpster is literally illegal without a multimillion dollar stormwater treatment system or a bunch of extra land (i.e. suburban sprawl).
This is also why you only ever see <low number> family houses on 1/16th to 1/8 acre (depending on the sqft of the house + parking) and the it jumps right to N-over-Y megacorp apartment blocks (maybe with retail on the bottom).