This. The people with influence in both parties benefit from the status quo, enjoy their privilege, and only want things to change from a distance.
Over the last few decades, we made home ownership a goal for the vast majority of the US populace. Now we expect those homeowners to vote against their own self-interest (to approve additional housing units/zoning).
What evidence is there that it is due to racism, classism and fear rather than rational self-interest?
Racist and classist concerns also influence property value. Blockbusting was a real estate practice that worked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
Is there an example of where that happened? A developer building an apartment building can pay more than an owner occupant.
The complaints from wealthy neighborhoods start with quality of life and degrade into questioning "what kind of people" will housing/transportation/amenities attract. I base this on listening to public meetings in SF / Bay Area so lots of local bias.
From a societal POV we should be building higher density and the drawbacks are worth it, but it is also in the rational self-interest of those building neighbors to vote against the new development.
NY has alleviated this somewhat by granting all existing landowners some air-rights that they can choose to sell to nearby highrises. Something like this might be the right way to go so that the nearby owners receive some recompense.
It's the same motivation as Marin County, CA and the Georgetown neighborhood of DC refusing train stops to "keep the riff raff out". The exclusion is the point.
I don’t care who lives next to me, because my interactions with them are limited to kindly waves as we pass on the sidewalk.
If I couldn’t park my car anywhere near my house because the alternative timeline neighborhood had twice as many cars because it had twice as many kitchens and exterior doors, I’d be less satisfied with my neighborhood as compared to now where the parking is generally adequate except on street cleaning days. That’s got nothing whatsoever to do with who the other car owners are, how expensive the other cars are, or how rich they are.
This is also some of where “each new residential lot needs X feet of frontage and Y parking spaces per unit” zoning laws come from. It’s not just “keep the poors out” (although that may be a secondary motivation for some).
1. Less dense development creates suburban sprawl. This means new people live farther away from their jobs than existing residents.
2. Those new people have to drive more miles each day than existing residents. ie traffic congestion is super linear on population growth.
3. The intersections that become bottlenecks get worse every year.
Texas style sprawl spreads out the offices more so their average commute times go up every year at a slower rate (but they still go up). The only proven solution is to allow housing that's dense enough for public transit to work efficiently.
I'm not saying your motivations are based in classism, racism, and fear, but the people motivated enough to engage in the political process "protecting the suburbs" generally are. They're smart enough to educate themselves on these issues, see the consequences, and say, "yes, this is what I want".
Residential zoning creates geographic segregation between rich and poor. In America that also means the housing crisis is making racial segregation worse(https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism). With the way public services are primarily administered at local level, once people are segregated then richer, whiter areas get the best schools, better parks, better maintained infrastructure, faster emergency response times, etc
Ironically, early residential zoning had explicitly bad intentions, but the impact was limited because there was so much land available to build on. 75 years later the consequences have escalated.
If you just add apartment house to existing residential street, you achieve neither. Especially when zoning does not allows small shops to appear.
It's like saying 'We want to change the zoning to make housing more affordable but don't worry it won't make housing more affordable'.
This.