Not necessarily -- people may want to live there in spite of the density, since not everybody is like you in turning down a 30% salary bump to avoid the big city. But it's definitely true that dense expensive places are dense and expensive because people want to live there. The regulatory problem being pointed out is that it's borderline-illegal to increase densities almost everywhere, despite increasing prices. It is all but certain that if there were no regulatory incentives for one level of density over another that there would be a lot more density than there is now.