It sounds good but...
...Los Angeles is a mess, California country-side is being gobbled out at a horrendous rate by development, friends and tourists tell me its the same everywhere.
and there’s no substitute for land, no way to make more of it.
so...
I don’t believe your rosy scenario.
What you describe is different from overpopulation. That is over-, or unwise development. Different causes, different solutions.
My grandfather, back when he was in college, wrote a graduate paper on the massive demographic shift the US was experiencing, as vast numbers of rural inhabitants moved to the cities. Starting after WWI, the big question was “How can Johnny return to the farm once he has seen Paris?”
In brief, he couldn’t, and didn’t want to. Then other big events, such as the dust bowl, added to the migration, as well as “the decline in family farms”, across the US.
Today, much of middle America is almost depopulated, except in the pinpoints of big cities in each State. This is why the cities seem crowded. No one has yet come up with any reason for people to return to rural America.
No jobs, few communities, boredom. In some States, they even now offer homesteaders tracts of land, low taxes, and cash bonuses just for moving there, but there are few takers.
You might even ask yourself if California is so dense, as it were, why not leave? For the price of a house there, you could afford a ranch elsewhere. But your motivations are much the same as other peoples.
People move to urban centers like LA because population growth creates economic opportunity and greater wealth. Many parts of the American mid-west have towns that the only people left are older people because their children have moved to better opportunities. Forcastes are that when these older people die off these areas will experience massive population decline (unless Mexicans move in to take their place).
Strange, self-inflicted ethnic cleansing.