> Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.

This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more.

Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification).

It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.