What would you recommend, Rocco? In Cities Skylines, I would knock down the low- or medium-density housing to zone for high-density buildings... But if each SF townhouse has a market value of $4,000,000 -- then just in terms of buying the space for a skyscraper, you'd have to shell out $80-$100 million, right?

Zoning issues like this are clearly one of the main contributors to the housing affordability crisis, but the problem is that homes are durable structures ("historic buildings" in some areas) that are still working, so it doesn't really make sense to "re-zone" areas that have already been built with the wrong type of zoning.

So since zoning was allowed to be low density (and racist in many places) for such a long time (coupled with white flight in many places), then there aren't many good areas for high-density in-fill development, even if NIMBY people wouldn't complain about it "changing the historic character of the neighborhood" by allowing less wealthy people to come in (while reducing the value of the NIMBY's home "investments.")