What if some people prefer to live in nice "hip" cities (that for them means culturally interesting) even at the cost of living without a private garden in a detached house?
And now the hip class wants to get rid of cars in their hip inner cities, because they don't need them. Again totally ignoring everyone that is both forced to live outside of the centre and work inside of it.
Actually, I think the minimum wage should be coupled to the typical rent around the working place. Good luck getting your new smartphone delivered then.
They could simply argue, that these jobs would not exist without densification. Take the other extreme: I don't think Starbucks employees would earn more if everyone would live on firms miles apart from each other. Starbucks would be gone in this scenario. Everyone would be poorer, albeit equally poorer.
So I would argue, you need to invest in public transportation and housing of different price ranges, possibly even built by the city itself, so threre are less incentives to defend legislation hindering new buildings, the actual reason why those workers are getting squeezed out. If you additionally try to focus on education and upward mobility you get a fair society.
You’re smoking some strong stuff if you think densifications causes gentrification. Reality has always been gentrification leads to investment leads to densification.
Gentrification starts with some Avantgarde subculture(s) rallying in parts of a city that are cheap and dense enough to find enough followers. Later, followers with many expulse the old residents and push the prices. This does never happen in some rural area.