Car-centric living is absolutely not quality-of-life focused...
When in reality, the productivity of an acre (and therefore its tax revenue) depends on that acre + all its inputs (people, services, etc).
Downtowns (aka central business districts) look wildly productive, but they're fueled by people who live... not there.
From this perspective, it's really more of a call for mixed use development [0], which is able to supply more of its own requirements AND benefit from locality.
It's not like a city exists in some impermeable bubble from the surrounding area. A great deal is shipped into a city through the suburbs and other surrounding area. Many workers commute in from suburbs which are often cheaper than the city even though they may have better school systems (even though the per student costs are often lower). Food comes in from generally more rural areas.
Cities and especially their denser and more walkable areas are dependent on the surrounding area in many ways. More dependent than the suburbs are on the city except perhaps for employment.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that while San Francisco was the original primary catalyst for development in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley (which is effectively suburban sprawl) would be just fine without the city at all. The same would have been true of the Boston area to a large degree especially 20 years or so ago, except perhaps for the universities.
If you want to consider the entire thing one unit (suburbs + downtown = unit), you still have to figure out how to pay for all the services. The more spread out everything is the more those services cost.
So it still comes down to the same thing. If you want, blame it on the government zoning downtown for no residents and only zoning for single family housing and therefore leading to the only affordable thing being the suburbs. But, to maintain those suburbs they're going to have to raise taxes 4x to 8x on everyone in that unit.
Population density in the US is 34.05 people per square kilometer.
Granted, a huge amount of the US should probably be discounted for a more realistic comparison (e.g. unlivable regions, BLM / park / national forest, and massive amount of farmland), which would bump the number up.
But we're still probably going to need some adjustments going from a country you can drive across in about 4 hours, to one where it would take 40+ hours.
If your “quality of life” is so compelling, why do you need to outlaw everything else, comrade?
“Tear down this wall, Mr Gorbachev”
Your city council is the People’s Central Planning Committee that runs the construction economy in your city. They decide what is produced and they decide who does it. Construction in your city is a planned economy - every bit as much as the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China.
And like every planned economy, it sucks and fails in just about every way.