"My book will argue that cities should instead embrace “Market Urbanism.” This phrase was invented in 2007 by Adam Hengels, a development consultant who founded the Market Urbanism blog [where the OP appeared]. He defines it as the intersection between capitalists and urbanists, and his contributors describe how municipal governments repeatedly harm economic productivity. My book will package his ideology into a series of proposals..."

So it seems like he's taken a development consultant as his role model and is fitting his observations into an already-decided ideology and action plan. That's why the article seems so one-dimensional and ignores obvious facts.

He essentially promises that, by lifting building restrictions, you can preserve ethnic neighborhoods from gentrification (for what that's worth), because development will be channeled elsewhere, e.g. into high-rises that the professional class (in his reading) favors.

Just writing it down exposes how facile this is.

And that doesn't even get into other problems, like the unguarded analogies between San Francisco and Miami ("warm-weather cities").

Here's an article that I enjoyed, which also reached a pro-development conclusion, but with a lot more nuance: http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2014/06/living-in-a-fools-para.... This appeared in a special issue devoted to the SF housing situation.