Sure, but you have to let people actually decide, instead of municipal zoning boards.
Worse, deeper thoughts about the future of "the city" and what projects make sense for the greater community to invest in are both crowded out.
This is happening on a smaller scale where I am right now in Ann Arbor. In our case, density is briskly proceeding downtown without enough thought toward things that people living downtown need such as parks and social services for the homeless.
I honestly think a lot of people in SF don't understand how much better big cities can be; there's a reason you don't see many NY transplants in the Bay. In more ways than one, the Bay Area is in a bubble.
San Francisco doesn't have that commuting pattern. It's daytime population is only about 200,000 larger than its night-time (less than 25% increase). A neighborhood designed to accommodate 50,000-75,000 people per square mile doesn't look like Midtown Manhattan. The near north side of Chicago is in that range, and it's very light and airy.
This is what a neighborhood of 60,000 residents per square mile looks like: http://goo.gl/maps/V8IS6. That's about 2.5x as dense as the Mission.
Until the 1970s, anyone could basically build whatever residential housing they wanted to anywhere. Not coincidentally, prices were low and relatively stable (by modern standards). During the 1970s, the city of Petaluma in CA passed the Petaluma Plan, which drastically restricted development. Courts accepted this and more and more residential restrictions.
In the short term they didn't seem to matter much. But in the last 40 years, as the population has grown and as people have realized that cities are pretty awesome in many ways (including economically), supply and demand have gotten way out of whack. One example is Santa Monica, which has the same number of residents it did in 1970 but vastly higher prices: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/12/sustainable_s.... Existing property owners, especially of existing single-family houses, like restricting property so the value of their property goes up (although they often disguise this in other rhetoric). Potential new residents can't vote, and courts have empowered existing residents and municipal boards.
Hypothetically, if we had some kind of national zoning / municipal board setting policy across the country, people in Texas or Arizona who wanted to move to SF would get equal weight with the people already in SF. As it stands, property owners in SF can exclude Texans through voting. I cite this as a thought experiment, not as a proposal.
Further reading: Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City.
City of Quartz is also goot to read and goes into NIMBYism and other related issues for the case of LA.