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Land utilization is always close to 100% in cities. It's a misnomer that cities can "run out of land". Cities go up, they increase density. If they can't go up, it is usually because of zoning restrictions. And that's a choice of local residents and authorities.

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I don't think that's true at all. Do you have data to support it? Everything I've seen indicates that most large cities do have a significant percentage of vacant land ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13574809.2016.11... ) and that cities like Seattle, SF, NYC, etc are indeed unique in their geographic constraints and total land utilization.

What I'm really talking about what I say "geographically constrained" is the elasticity of housing supply. Cities like Seattle, SF and NYC have less elastic housing supply in part because of their current land utilization and geographic constraints hemming in new development. That's a pretty well understood phenomenon.

How do you think NYC supports the population it does? Manhattan is not filled single dwelling houses, but at one time it was. It was much easier to build in NYC in the past than now. If they applied the same zoning restrictions then as SF does now, it never would have become the city that it is today.

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