>(1) Do not such articles sound like "not everyone can afford a holiday in Hawai"? Or "all my friends have a Mercedes AMG but I don't"? What is the difference? *
It would be useful, for many reasons, to have a greater proportion of people living in cities. So, it's useful to challenge your implicit assumption that doing so ought to be a luxury.
(2) In Bay Area, the daily commute itself is an obvious sign of overpopulation. How does more housing not make it even worse?
a) The commute is awful because the Bay Area is overpopulated relative to its transit infrastructure, not some natural limit. Or, conversely, the Bay Area's transit infrastructure is under-provisioned relative to its population. Faster, more extensive transit infrastructure can drastically improve the commute at both current and higher population levels.
b) We also underutilize the land close to commute destinations, so everyone (but the residents of single-family homes near downtown) has to travel further than they should. Pedestrians don't need much in the way of infrastructure (just sidewalks, which most of SF already has). Building more residential skyscrapers in the midst of business districts lets more people walk to work in a short time. Building more mid-rises (~6 stories) where there are currently single-family homes gets more people into commute distances that are reasonably quick on a bicycle, motor scooter, or public transit. Density of residents also promotes density of stores, so that i.e. everyone can be a short walk from their grocery store, rather than needing a car to shop, and the reclaimed land previously dedicated to parking can house more people.
(1) For the sake of extending the same analogy, the question is not whether people should have vacations and cars or not, it is about everybody asking for luxury vacations or cars.
(2) IMHO, housing may for sure move some people closer to their work but it also means more service workers and other jobs to move to the same spot; this sounds to me like a vicious circle. At the end isn't it this vicious circle that drives city growth? Even if the commute problem is solved, which I doubt looking all the cities I lived or know a little bit, how are we going to prevent the classic environmental challenges: clean water, or effects on natural habitat?
It might be better as a matter of policy for more people to live in cities. I get the arguments even if I might not personally care to follow that path. However, that doesn't make it better as a matter of policy to cram people into as few different cities as possible. There's plenty of housing to be had at reasonable prices in Detroit, for example.
In general, city living is not a luxury. Living in what are generally viewed as desirable neighborhoods of certain cities is.
It would be useful, for many reasons, to have a greater proportion of people living in cities. So, it's useful to challenge your implicit assumption that doing so ought to be a luxury.
(2) In Bay Area, the daily commute itself is an obvious sign of overpopulation. How does more housing not make it even worse?
a) The commute is awful because the Bay Area is overpopulated relative to its transit infrastructure, not some natural limit. Or, conversely, the Bay Area's transit infrastructure is under-provisioned relative to its population. Faster, more extensive transit infrastructure can drastically improve the commute at both current and higher population levels.
b) We also underutilize the land close to commute destinations, so everyone (but the residents of single-family homes near downtown) has to travel further than they should. Pedestrians don't need much in the way of infrastructure (just sidewalks, which most of SF already has). Building more residential skyscrapers in the midst of business districts lets more people walk to work in a short time. Building more mid-rises (~6 stories) where there are currently single-family homes gets more people into commute distances that are reasonably quick on a bicycle, motor scooter, or public transit. Density of residents also promotes density of stores, so that i.e. everyone can be a short walk from their grocery store, rather than needing a car to shop, and the reclaimed land previously dedicated to parking can house more people.