More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.
supply < demand: build more housing.
demand > supply: build less housing
If demand grows faster than supply then it just means that you need to build more housing.
And let's be honest in a world with massive amounts of liquid capital but nothing worthwhile to invest into an infinite money sink that keeps increasing ROI the more you spend on it is actually almost magical and you know what? It's impossible in a world with physical constraints. You just haven't reached them yet.
There are already tons of incentives and tax breaks like this for companies. Just for a recent example, see Amazon HQ2. Companies also have the added incentive of lower labor costs. It's clearly not enough yet.
That's a good example actually. It's hard to understand that NYC was offering subsidies to Amazon. NYC doesn't really need more people or more companies.
The real issue is that this is true of everything. Cities compete with each other, but major metro hubs have such an intrinsic advantage that it allows them to suffer a large amount of corruption and waste and still not be uncompetitive. Until you're negotiating with a company large enough to bring with it its own economies of scale, and then it does make you uncompetitive, because Amazon could build HQ2 in the middle of the desert and a town would spring up around it regardless, in a way that a guy operating a food truck absolutely could not.
They don't actually want to do that because NYC still has its intrinsic advantages, but if it also has very high taxes which then go to waste and not toward providing useful services, the benefits have to be weighed against the costs. (And realistically there are also better alternatives like Virginia rather than literally the middle of the desert.)
Then the city becomes concerned that their high taxes and low efficiency are costing them Amazon so they come up with some kind of carve outs which they would need to keep Amazon but not the food truck or the real estate developer or doctor's office, and so it applies only to huge corporations and not to everybody else.
Which then creates an unfair advantage for major companies with that kind of leverage, and then they start eating everything and driving out small and medium businesses who can't compete when they're the only ones paying high taxes. And that's what makes people upset.
But you're never going to get Amazon if your offer is to tax them heavily and then waste the money. The way to be competitive on a level playing field is to cut out the waste in general so that nobody has to pay high taxes for low benefits.
Density should come hand in hand with power-rebalancing measures, e.g. tax property hikes, more efficient zoning, and government-controlled rent, but practically it doesn't happen.
Land value taxation is one way to reduce speculative land use by landlords, but it's rarely used, unfortunately. And in California it would require overturning Prop 13, a hugely regressive tax policy that has been somehow falsely enshrined as helping the little guy out, when in reality it mostly helps landlords and speculative land hoarders.
The idea that jobs can be placed anywhere flies in the face of pretty much every single city's economic development efforts over the past few decades. It's not realistic, or reasonable.
What can be placed anywhere is housing. The only reason that we don't have higher density is a small number of landowners lobbying to keep everything identical to the way that it was when they moved in, and when they moved in they had just massively changed the landscape from fruit groves to suburban sprawl. They said: change to allow me, but no more. And now they benefit massively by restricting density around them.
The focusing is done due to a whole host of reasons but certainly encouraging jobs to spread out is not a bad idea for a number of reasons - including having options and livability
"Density" in my comment is population density, not construction density. Unfortunately, construction density (and height) is restricted by zoning and all kinds of bylaws. Most residential areas in North America allow only single-family houses and prohibit multi-tenant buildings with 3-4 floors or more. Landlords benefit from such zoning rules immensely, because they drive land price up.
If we veer into market theory for a moment, it's better for everyone if there are many cities that are competitive places for technology companies.
I guess it's kind of an insurance against terrible (local) government policies if people move from city to city when one of them screws up. That doesn't sound like a terribly efficient system though.