Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
