there are a ton of housing policies that are based on the redlineing, racism etc that we take for granted that need to change, and are changing that would go a long way to solving these problems. for example, minneapolis just overturned there policy on limiting the number of unrelated humans who live in a house, which will go a long way to fixing the density problem. this policy was based on racism mostly, with a healthy dose of "get off my lawn ya damn kids"
another policy that st paul is fixing is mandatory parking counts. this is a byproduct of the automotive industries middle man, that when you build/rent a business location, there must be enough car parking around it in order to pass city code. as a result, huge sections of down town are parking lots. which is absurd, because you are in a city, why the hell do you want to park your car? this leads to lower density, and lower tax returns because the land is not being used for its economic benefit. and it just leads to the suburban problem .... just miles and miles of worthless first floor light commercial. I was just in LA last month, i fucking hate LA. because outside of the downtown, LA is literally just hundreds of miles of suburban first floor commercial. its just hundreds of miles of suburban shittiness. to go anywhere is a half an hour car drive, on two interstates ... its just the worst city in the world IMO.
codes that reward sprawl are bad. em kay. we are fighting redlining, 70 years of the automotive middle man, racism, and the like, because thats why our cities are way they are. solve those problems, and the cities work.