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What you're describing is pretty broadly true around the world. Certainly some cities, especially those with strong urban planning authority, do better with transit and new housing than others. But most cities with high demand to live there worldwide are expensive for locals who are usually also unhappy with various aspects of transit/traffic/etc.

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I believe it. I don’t mean to imply this is only true for America — I just didn’t want to overstate my case.

Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.

One of the challenges is that, with rare exceptions, cities don't build out in advance of demand and, once the demand is there, rebuilding housing, transportation, and other systems is often expensive and disruptive--and can really be hard without a strong central authority.

Singapore is probably about as good an example as any (at least outside of China) of centralized urban planning (and they even have an interesting gallery on it https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate). But, while getting around Singapore works pretty well, it's certainly not a city you would call especially affordable in general.

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