Communities should have a say in their community. The issue is lack of new towns being built with high speed rail / transportation to bring people into central hubs. All the good land is taken. Build further out with tiny homes and build public transportation lines. Let people build affordable communities that suit them. No, they aren't going to have beach views or anything like that. But YOU will own it. We already know from the mouse utopia experiments that increasing density is a terrible idea for humans. Expand out.

Local communities should not have plenary authority over what gets built, otherwise society devolves to a series of gated communities designed to keep new residents out. Gated communities are probably fine in exurbs, but when they're in the inner rings of cities, benefiting from urban economic opportunity, they're a pathology.