To put it in your terms, why does it make more sense to tell existing residents "your place has to change and you can move if you don't like it" vs channel the new residents to other places where more housing is available and is available cheaper.
Your perspective amounts to existing residents extracting all the economic value in a location simply because they bought land there first.
That's ridiculously inefficient and toxic at a national scale. Or even at a local scale, over 40-50years.
One important paper on the topic calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of large metro areas being too expensive to move into [1]
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21154/w211...
I think people mainly think of it as "their home and their community" rather than "economic extraction"
// calculated 50% GDP losses in the US because of large metro areas being too expensive to move into
Doesn't that strike you as obvious bullshit?
It doesn't matter what they think. Some people also talk of "protecting property values".
At the end of the day it's all ways to restrict the allowable number of units per square foot of land.
Those people are enriching themselves sitting on a piece of land. It's not the value of the building on the land that is going up.
This modern landed gentry are not improving the economic value of their land. They are extracting the economic value through higher resale prices. Because *other people* are doing productive economic activity nearby.
It's the same idea as "everybody works but this vacant lot" [1] on a large scale.
> Doesn't that strike you as obvious bullshit?
No. You can go read the paper, come back and argue methodology.
The economic GDP gain for a person from West Virginia to NYC is large.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Ev...
Even then in a town here, most of the electrorate is renters, but most people who actually vote are homeowners.
And a public library district found it better to "protect themselves" with a card fee for non-residents rather than open access to all state residents (like nearly all other public libraries around them, and like the state financially encourages.)
So yes, it makes sense for the voters to have only so much power and influence. Sometimes it would be nice if someone in that pile concerned themselves with a longer term vision than "my lawn, right now". And that doesn't mean their political hobby either.
At some point you have to give up; if the electorate doesn't even bother caring enough to vote, what can you do?
Currently in California, there is some push at the state level to try and move things along - and override some city rules. Also one surprising city noticed that their past gridlock is not helpful (Berkeley, CA! Surprising because they are said to have invented restrictive zoning).
Then some cities in the Los Angeles area somehow managed to never get in that rut at all, and allow construction. And they are not exactly hellholes because of that.
Replacing First Past The Post voting with an alternative voting system will eliminate any chance of a spoiler effect. People could feel safe in the fact that if the party that best represents them doesn't make it, their vote will continue to be counted throughout the election.
More political parties means more representation, and a bigger portion of the population being involved in the electoral process.
More competition means higher quality representation, even from established parties.
So all the outlying neighrborhoods/cities/areas -- MANY of which were built out in 40s to support the war effort as we were building liberty ships in the bay at an alarming rate - and all those women workers needed housing (rosie the riveter)...
So all these tiny packed neighborhoods needed for the 1940s workforce resulted.
Now we have a 2040 workforce need in the exact same way for building Liberty LLMS! (Expect of poisoning the dirt with war chemicals - we will find another similar metaphor digitally)
(most of saily city, alameda, treasure island, hunters point, candle stick, dog patch, etc - were all heavy industry for these ships and the naval base - and they were massive amounts of toxics buried in the dirt.
This is why hunters point was always ghetto - because they knew it was a Super Site - and so many people have gotten sick from it. Which is also why it was a very slow process to build stuff out new because new laws require environmental impacts which include soil sampling which reveals Super Site chemicals...
The very tip of Alameda Naval base was also a dumping pit now Super Site -- they decided that its cheaper to pound giant metal posts as a barrier to prevent the chemicals leeching into the bay - rather than spend 10 times as much to clean up the site properly.
and this just happened in the last 20ish years.. its been leaking into the bay since WWII
Residents don't and shouldn't expect to have the final say on who can live in their area. This is explicitly acknowledged by, for example, racial housing covenants being illegal these days.