I've never understood this: If I replace a single home with 20 apartment homes, I've raised the value of the whole property at purchase time no? You're already dealing with home valuations that have faaar outstripped wages, the only way you go any higher is to build more homes on the same property.
Counterintuitively, the "I don't want to live next to apartments" line of thinking actually seems more potent in the regular NIMBY headspace? Like people will forego higher valuations to keep their suburb a suburb.
It's a commons problem. In your scenario, you have absolutely increased the value of your property. 20 apartments is more valuable than a single family home. However, you have also reduced aggregate demand by housing 20 people. That reduced the value of your neighbors' properties (or at least reduced the rate at which their value increased).
NIMBYism posits that values will continue to increase without forcing any property owners to invest in improvements so long as they collectively block any efforts to increase supply.
Local to me, Arlington and Reston VA have both seen massive building sprees over the past 20ish years (mostly adjacent to the Metro). Home values have never been higher in either location.
My own personal example... I live ~1 mile from the Metro, so just outside the building boom zone. There was next to zero housing in that zone - it was all office parks - and now it's a mix of $1+ million townhomes, $1+ million luxury high-rise condos, and dining/retail. My own home value is up 50% since COVID and that's true for just about any house in my zip code.
And without the redevelopment/infill, I posit the whole area would be less desirable. NIMBYism feels more about "change is bad" than property values.
But Falls Church is much nicer now that a few mid-rise apartment buildings with ground-level retail have gone in! As a resident, I am very happy about all the new development. I expect that over time, that will have a positive effect on property values, but there is an observable short- and medium-term effect working in the opposite direction as the increased housing supply eases demand on the existing housing stock.
Now we have a large homeless encampment partially on the apartment complex lot - that the complex can't deal with because their lawyers told them off.
Now we have a significant uptick in petty but quality of life impacting crime.
The roads around the apartment complex are now swamped because the entrances were placed stupidly.
And the people who live in that apartment complex are also upset about all of this.
None of this is about "my investment". It is about not letting commercial outfits hurt my quality of life to subsidize their profit margin. It's not the fault of the tenants, nor me.
Now we get to sue the stupid property management company until they fix their issues.
The thing that is prized above all else is privacy and exclusivity. People are paying money to ensure that few people live near them and that those people are the "right sort of people."
Dating back to the 1930s the original core goal of zoning was to restrict apartments so as to keep poor people and minorities out of certain areas. We know this because it's well documented in the newspapers of the day because back then people were more comfortable explicitly saying how classist and racist they were.
