>People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change.

Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.

It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.

I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.

OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further.

Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area?

Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces.

Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper!

But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.

> There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why?

Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.

>I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not.

I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.