There is an awful lot to commend in this piece, but it falls a little short by assuming that it should be easy to wave away the objections of those who benefit from the status quo.
On the plus side, the piece is very much aligned with the thinking of Strong Towns (StrongTowns.org), which does a lot of work to promote a development patter than makes cities and towns stronger and more fiscally resilient. It's clear that continuing a vestigal activity just because we've always done it that way is absurd.
On the minus side, the piece seems to ignore human nature, and thus organizational nature. Human nature is to carry on comfortable and familiar activities long after the point where it makes sense--change is disruptive to those affected, and the small numbers of those who will be intensely affected can readily combine forces and punch much harder than the much greater number of people who are at most peripherally affected by the status quo. The folks who will lose their jobs have a lot more incentive to fight this than do the many more folks who will struggle to detect any change in their property taxes when this change finally comes (as it inevitably will). The fastest road to happiness here is to figure out a transition plan that pays due respect to folks who work there, rather than just demanding that they simply disappear and lose their livelihoods without a struggle. Sort of what we should have done for all the other steps in de-industrialization.
I think the concerns about sea level rise can be addressed through design -- yes, it's more expensive to build that way, but the rewards for building up and creating more housing are so substantial that projects should pencil out just fine. Assuming that there's not some reason that building upward is problematic . . . .
Which brings us to the far greater barrier that I see and that might well make any substantial amount of vertical development cost prohibitive: the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake that we're overdue for. The costs of trying to build multistory buildings capable of surviving the accelerations caused by a 9.0+ quake on that dredge fill would be astronomical. It does no good to build with an eye to protect against the much more gradual threat of sea level rise but ignore the catastrophic threat of liquified soils leading to collapsed structures and total loss of life.
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