In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build miserable tracts of poorly constructed wood frame houses.
I personally believe they're mostly wrong - urbanization probably won't harm home values. And done well, might improve the values even more.
> they're rightfully concerned
Yeah for sure. A lot of the pushback against development is a gut feel concern, the fear of losing something, it's not rational. The "rightfully" part I guess is because institutions groom people in borrowing for single family homes, and specifically that e.g. Try financing a multi-family on the same favorable terms. Few people enjoy pensions at an old age, so you're kind of thrown for the wolves if you don't own a home. The system really is maladjusted.
A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure and NIMBY-leaning people and groups were powerful. Now both sides are mad, the YIMBY side because it is still taking a long time to build enough to see affordability improve (especially with the interest rate shock), and the NIMBY side because they can see all those new townhomes and apartments going up in suburbs and smaller towns and densification projects in the city center, and dislike that.
I remember I used to complain that housing was so expensive and you never saw anything getting built despite there being plenty of great places to build things. And then one day I realized that a lot of construction was happening in a lot of those places I was thinking of, and I should stop complaining, since what I wanted to see happen was actually happening!
It's hard to feel like it's "better" for both sides to be mad while affordability is still bad, but I do think it's better than what seemed more like an insurmountable problem to me a decade ago.
What's missing is smaller apartment blocks (4-8 units), small THs or SFHs (<3000sqft), or duplex/triplex/etc.
That is beginning to change, largely as a result of rezoning around the Metro corridor. More mixed use, more low-rise condos. But, this is limited to areas that are suitable for complete redevelopment (mostly old low-rise offices within 1/2 mile of a Metro station).
Nuking the SFH zoning to allow market forces to drive development outside the immediate Metro-adjacent plots would help. Allows ADUs and "granny flats". Allow a SFH to be split into a duplex or rebuilt as 3-4 THs. Etc.
[0]: https://i0.wp.com/publicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S...
Imagine if we suddenly got a bunch of articles on HN about the "website affordability crisis" and it was a bunch of FAANG engineers and ex FAANG employees and want-to-be FAANG employees talking about how you can't build a reliable website for less than a few million in cloud services and monitoring and logging from Datadog and the like. Sure from their perspective of trying to build a FAANG scale service that might be true, but it would also seem insane to the rest of us who are wondering what's wrong with throwing up a few boxes in a colo center or even a few basic EC2 instances and a cloudflare proxy if you just want some affordable website hosting.
Not every IT problem or company needs Google scale solutions, and not every community (or even community suffering from a housing affordability problem) needs Seattle scale solutions either.
They're not, as evidenced by the literally millions of apartments in existence.
Here's Fairfax CO VA. Everything in yellow or green is largely zoned for SFHs (with differing # units/acre). https://fairfaxcountygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/i...
