But this doesn’t offer any justification for why, for locations that people highly value living in, we as a society ought to do anything other than maximize the number of people living there.
You shouldn't maximize the number of people anywhere - it creates sadness and kills communities. It's also not the only solution.
Sure, but it is an option (as well as everywhere along the spectrum up to maximization), and so ‘people want to move there’ is not on its own a justification for ‘prices must go up’.