Nope Nope Nope Nope Nope Nope. This is bad all around. City planning comes with city council incompetence. Houston is spread out because it has to be. We live on "gumbo". The soil is so mixed up that larger, heavier buildings subside. Buildings settle, the ground moves, things shift, then the foundations crack. It's why we don't have basements.
It rains during the winter, saturating the soil, and causing the ground to shift. It bakes during the summer, causing the soil to compact and weaken. Year after year, this happens, until another building needs to be torn down.
Developers want a small, compact, city but it can't happen in Houston.
For an historical example, I'll bring up the West Side command center the city built about a decade or so ago. All regulations were followed. Soil samples were taken. Everything got the green light. Once the building was completed, things started to shift, doors didn't match up, and the ground buckled. Turns out, if they had drilled down a few more feet past what they did, they would have found a big patch of sand. Millions wasted.
The "sprawl" is a fact of life like levies in New Orleans and bedrock in New York. We are not going to be like those cities because we are not built where those cities are. We live in bog.
The planning we need is regional flood control. We need the authority and funds to build flood control throughout the region an not just in Houston. Houston is the economic heart of Texas but we're treated as an afterthought. We need to push Austin to let us build the necessary infrastructure we need to be safe. Compressing the city will only make the problem worse.