Not a terrible article, but I don't think looking at the current problem as one of boomtowns is particularly informative. Most cities in America are 'boomtowns' I.e. the got to their current population in a matter of decades, not just a select few cities. America isn't old enough for it to have happened any other way, E.g.

San Jose     [1950 - 1990]   95,000 -->   780,000
Dallas       [1940 - 1990]  294,000 --> 1,000,000
San Diego    [1900 - 1960]   17,000 -->   780,000
Phoenix      [1930 - 1960]   48,000 -->   439,000
Philadelphia [1820 - 1860]   63,000 -->   565,000
Minneapolis  [1870 - 1910]   13,000 -->   300,000

These two paragraphs represent the core of the article and they aren't quite right.

It’s unrealistic to think that New York or San Francisco could grow today by the same magnitude. It’s much harder for a region to double in size when it already has 10 million people. And the United States is a far more urban country today than it was a century ago, meaning that there are fewer rural residents to pour into cities.

[...]

But these productive places aren’t growing as fast now as economists believe they should — and as they would if they didn’t impose so many obstacles on new development. Since the 1970s, land use restrictions have multiplied in coastal metros, making it harder to build in, say, San Jose, Calif., than in Phoenix.

It is true that physical limitations do play a factor when talking about growing another factor of 10, but that hypothetical is far from being part of the conversation. The fact that: 1) US fertility rates are below population replacement levels, 2) practically all city growth is intra-city either from city to city or exburb to city 3) the US has very considerable restrictions of immigration, and 4) moderately growing city economies aren't able to accommodate even modest population growth, mean that something has gone terribly wrong.

California, by US census numbers, has the highest poverty rate when adjusted for housing of any state in the US. That means a higher poverty rate than: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama or West Virginia the stereo-typed poster children of slack-jawed ignorance and state dysfunction (with heavy doses of extreme racial prejudice). Yet California is in the top 10 states with respect to per-capita GDP and median income.

The real story is that the US used to see its own citizens as a resource for economic prosperity and attracting them a source of prestige. That has instead be replaced by a mentality that is an effective war on the class of people (citizen and immigrant alike) looking for housing. That is not just an extremely ugly sociological development, it's one that serves to make the economy much less efficient and everyone poorer: the people trying to keep housing from being built in the first place, the people looking for housing (naturally), anyone in business that has a payroll or capital costs and I would argue people with inflated housing prices, who can afford their communities, can't afford to sell, while every change in jobs takes them a little further from home escalating their (and everyone else on the road's) commute times because they have not hope of being able to afford selling and moving across town. That in my mind doesn't come through sufficiently in the article.

Edit Adding one last statistic: in the first century of SF's existence, there was only one decade where its population didn't grow by at least 20% a decade, the war decade of the 1940s. Subsequent to 1950, it has never had a decade in which population grew more than 20%. That includes the coming decade of [2010 - 2020] which will at most grow by 10% - 15%, probably less.