I would rather it just be expensive to live in NYC
Can you explain what benefit could come from making NYC more expensive? Who benefits from that, and how? I could see landowners wanting that, but that's such a tiny fraction of the NYC populace that I doubt that's your motivation...
NYC doesn’t have any physical gates, but living in manhattan in particular, has a high financial gate, keeping out people who can’t afford it.
Generally people paying 5k+ rents aren’t committing violent crime, homeless sweeps actually happen here and it’s not really possible to sleep on the street.
If you live in an exclusive neighborhood, it’s pretty clean and safe.
there’s angst cheaper rent would change that
EDIT: In a lot of ways NYC’s wealthy and the upper middle class that mostly lives in manhattan have mutual interests the biggest being public safety
interesting interview if you’re interested in more
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?...
People in cities have fewer children, and since children are the future tax base you might want that to occur so that you're not ground up into dogfood in your old age to pay down the national debt.
I do wonder how people think office buildings will comply with fire code which demands multiple avenues of escape from bedrooms during such a catastrophe.
Other places in the world that do not require multiple exits for fires tend to have lower rates of fire death than we do in the US. The multiple exits thing is not actually for fire safety, it's to make multifamily housing harder to build and have less pleasant floor plans. Better fire suppression technology, having closer access to the stairs, are things that actually improve fire safety in practice.
Also while it may “give people more options” it inevitably would increase density in one of the most dense cities in the western world. Can you explain why that’s a good thing too?
Giving people an option to choose a better life for themself is good in and of itself in my opinion.
Further, density is far better for the environment, greatly decreasing our impact on the environment, and making it easier for us to prevent climate change. It's also far better for the economy, for arts, for science... nearly all human endeavors benefit from the density of cities.