Sure there is. Infill is a thing, brownfield development is a thing, rezoning is a thing. Look at any Rust Belt city, especially the east side or the downhill side, you'll see plenty of empty lots or boarded up houses.

The average length of homeownership is about 12 years. If you were to choose one city block with detached single-story houses and rezone it as medium density (apartments or townhouses, minimum 12 units per acre or 50 people per acre) with current usage grandfathered in, it would send a message to the owners that the property values would not be rising. Within 6 years you would have at least 30% of the block go up for sale, and a municipality or people's housing entity could exercise right of first refusal, buying up the properties and putting lots of people in them, without the familial relation requirements, and adding accessory units too. Within a decade your land trust would own half the block, and they could start building on the in-between spaces or doing renovations or even demolishing buildings for larger constructions. And that's operating within the current framework.

Really, the zoning is what people would push back the hardest against. The 11% of homeowners (and a good chunk of the 52% of mortgagers) do love their R-1 zoning. But if you had expropriation power this wouldn't be a problem.

The only places where there's truly no place to build are places that are already at an ideal density.