As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.
West Berekely has (last time I checked) a 45 ft limit on building heights. They also have deliberate dead ends to discourage driving on side streets. Piedmont forbids multi tenant buildings and has a time limit of two or three days before a citation can be issued for a resident's parked car staying in the same spot. My buddy was openly criticized by his neighbor in Piedmont for the way he managed his lawn, which was not neglected. These are absolutely issues of politics and discouraging undesirables to live elsewhere.
This is in East Bay, where we tend to consider ourselves progressive, and it's called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The Berkeley tactics are a blatant example of, "It's ok when we do it because we're special."
There absolutely are hordes of NIMBY tactics used in Berkeley politics, with nearly zero coherency, attempting to stop dense development especially downtown.
otherwise, what is happening is traffic is being discouraged/encouraged overall which has economic consequences.
TANSTAAFL
Where I grew up (northwestern PA), there are suburbs where you can get a few acres and city water hookup. We don't consider it truly rural until you have double digit acreage and a water well.
Because redlining was often an explicitly racist choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.
> During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.