Your continued breathing objectively decreases the amount of oxygen in my environment.
At some point you gotta draw some lines, and ownership (combined with reasonable zoning rules) is a pretty good line.
At some point you gotta draw some lines, and ownership (combined with reasonable zoning rules) is a pretty good line.
That's the point though isn't it? People who buy into areas that are zoned SFH do that because they want to live somewhere with that level of density. Rezoning and increasing density is a rugpull with both intangible and direct economic harms.
"Rugpull" implies that they were told or under the impression it would always be SFH and they'd have the ability to deny its change unilaterally, which is not and has never been the case.
If you live in a SFH in a subdivision on a quiet road, next to a large piece of undeveloped land, that's desirable property. But the fact that it's desirable now doesn't guarantee it will be desirable at any point in the future, and you don't have any say in what happens to that undeveloped land unless you own it.
That six figure check might not be so exciting when it means they have to pay transaction costs (~10%) and transfer taxes. Hopefully they don't also have capital gains too (the nominal gain isn't much comfort when they need to find a similarly priced new home; capital gains on housing is mostly a tax on avoiding inflation). Hopefully they aren't also seeing an increase in mortgage rates if they need one. Then they need to find somewhere new to live, probably in an entirely new city (or state) to find somewhere with the zoning they wanted still in place. This destroys social connections and probably requires finding new work, on top of the move itself and the difficulty picking out somewhere to live in an unfamiliar area. If they try to instead stick it out, increased property taxes might bleed them out until they're at a net loss and are forced to move.
So yeah of course people who don't want high development near them and picked somewhere to live with regulations against it will vote to preserve those regulations. Conversely, speculators and developers know when they buy property that is is zoned not to allow what they want, but they take a gamble on their ability to change zoning.
Well, that's what we used to have, to make it all work. You used to trust that if you bought in a neighborhood zoned "R-1", it would mostly stay "R-1" for at least a little while. (same for "PUD-3", and so on)
But "urbanists" started de-regulating all the reasonable zoning rules that made that system work, so now no one can trust that the rules would be enforced anymore, which is how you get random citizens reflexively fighting things (and the prevalence of HOAs, as an extra block against it, and so on)
Citation needed
> …that made that system work
Citation very much needed