Still possible, but you have to run an entire political marketing campaign, complete with mailers, etc. Furthermore, with a ballot-box planning process, developers are going to bypass the typical considerations that the city's professional planning staff usually asks for in favor of whatever they think is broadly marketable to a voting public.

The cost of these additional processes adds up. Urban containment and growth control are not free. In many cases, these policies do legitimately protect a certain quality of life, but they are also effectively a tax on newcomers and prospective residents.

California home prices started deviating from national norms around the mid-1970s after individual communities and the state supreme court started enacting growth control policies. It created a system that is so politically unpredictable that we're simply not able to produce enough housing to keep up with population growth at a time when the country is re-urbanizing.

This isn't public review, it's a public vote. A vote is a vastly different barrier to entry than review. One of the biggest complaints I have about the west coast--and, yes, I'm a transplant so I bring my own ideas to the party--is this obsession that everything should be put to a vote. The initiative process is broken in this regard because it increases that expectation.

Public officials, especially elected ones, are supposed to have discretion. That's why we elect them. If they screw up, we vote out the people responsible, not erect more set-in-amber barriers to doing things in the future.