> I mean, what people want should be accounted somehow, that's the point of a democracy, isn't it?

What people want is often contradictory. They want affordable, nice housing near their work, but given most people work near other people, they don't want high density housing like condos. You can satisfy all of these demands simultaneously.

The ideal solution would be to eliminate the concept of a central business district entirely and arrange businesses into office parks thoroughly dispersed among suburban sprawl.

I might agree, but you still have the same density problems, and you now also have the problem of people commuting into residential areas with schools and such. I'm not sure, while the idea seems appealing at first glance, it seems fraught with problems.

This is how Silicon Valley is organized, and it's terrible.

The real fix is to start behaving like a large city and put rail out to the suburbs.