> You can't just easily go buy a townhouse for cheap.

But this is precisely the issue. The issue is not cities, it's housing scarcity. Housing scarcity just tends to be correlated with cities because demand there is typically high and then land owners capture the local government to constrain supply.

The problem isn't housing in cities, it's the lack of housing in and around cities. What would happen if there was enough for it to be cheap?