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Check the zoning closer there is a maximum amount of units per acre and it's a small lot, my back of the napkin math says that you actually can't put a bigger building on that lot, much less one 4x time the size. The purple line isn't relevant - this area is not actually close to the purple line route and already closer to the Takoma Metro then it is to any future purple line stop so you can scrap that point entirely. Not exactly sure how you want to try and justify that you were willing to allow more people into the same neighborhood without waiting for a new transit line for a large building but somehow we gotta wait for it for the single family homes next door. So in either scenario you have to go through the same zoning ordinance changes so your whole premise here is bunk and comes down to little more than rooting for evictions. In one scenario we kick dozens of people to the curb with no compensation or choice in order to squeeze a taller building (and I don't know where you're going to put 4x the parking, which is legally required, in addition) where there's already density, in the other we are giving middle class people a ton of money, a profit on their house, to leave if they choose, to add density where there isn't any. It also takes time to evict dozens of tenants, tear down an existing structure and build a new one that will be more costly to build and more expensive long term to maintain. A quick look at the map shows the single family lots in the neighborhood are almost as big as the lot in question - if a developer got two of them next to each other, not really that implausible, they could build an even larger building, or even with one at a time they could convert to small walk ups of maybe 8 units a piece, which I think is actually much more feasible than making some strange super thin needle like 16 story building with a ton of underground parking that's a longish walk from transit and dreaming a developer can get a profit out of that. The wages comment is rather detached from reality, housing prices have been soaring past inflation for decades, and while wages have been going up somewhat very recently it's still less than inflation and only after decades of stagnation with inflation, so wages have effectively been going down forever and now essentially went down a little less and that somehow has any meaning in a county where the cheapest house anywhere is half a million dollars? Not at all relevant since no one who's making 15/hr who used to make 12 is somehow going to buy a half million dollar house.