The chapter opens with the mythic phrase attributed to Horace Greeley—“Go West”—and contrasts it with Greeley’s real life: he built his career and power in New York City. The authors use that tension to argue that America romanticized frontier land, but historically achieved mass prosperity and upward mobility through dense cities that turn resources and ideas into innovation.

The authors frame modern cities as the new “economic frontier” because growth is ultimately driven by ideas, not land. Yet in today’s most productive “superstar” metros (Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston), housing has become prohibitively expensive because supply has not kept pace with demand. The chapter traces a decades-long decline in US homebuilding relative to population and peer countries, showing how escalating costs now turn moving to places like New York into an effective pay cut, transforming cities from “escalators” into “luxury products.”

Next, the authors explain why cities matter more, not less, in an era of cheap travel and digital communication: innovation depends on proximity, dense labor markets, and specialized ecosystems. Even firms that could operate remotely cluster where talent clusters, and many companies pulled workers back into offices because trust and speed are harder to build at a distance. As a result, high housing costs do not fully expel elite workers and firms, but they severely undermine cities’ second role—broad-based mobility for service workers and families.

The chapter then links housing scarcity to widening inequality and declining upward mobility. Drawing on Raj Chetty’s work, it argues children’s outcomes depend heavily on place and years spent in high-opportunity areas, but steep rents now repel lower-income movers who once converged toward richer regions. The authors contend this reversal was not accidental: many blue, “symbolically liberal” communities fight new housing while signaling progressive values, turning liberal governance into operational conservatism on growth.

Tracing the policy roots, the chapter recounts the rise of zoning from early city organization to modern anti-growth restriction, highlighting California’s shift from rapid postwar building (exemplified by Lakewood) to caps and growth boundaries (exemplified by Petaluma). It then ties California’s extreme homelessness to housing scarcity rather than weather, services, or drugs, using Colburn and Aldern’s “musical chairs” model and showing how eliminating low-cost forms like boardinghouses pushed the poorest into the street.

Finally, the authors argue the anti-growth turn accelerated in the 1970s as homes became central to household wealth and homeowners used zoning to protect asset values, often cloaking self-interest in concerns like traffic or “character.” They also present a more sympathetic driver: midcentury growth produced pollution, sprawl, and highway destruction, triggering a bipartisan environmental and procedural regulatory wave. In California, CEQA became a powerful tool after the Friends of Mammoth decision extended it to most private development, helping enable litigation that blocked thousands of homes and cemented the modern housing shortage.