That's a great point, and one that has been largely missed here.
I used to live in a city with aggressive green-space initiatives. (85% of the city had to be green space.) Locals would tell me that it was "good for the environment".
I'm sorry, but no. Green space initiatives force sprawl. They're bad for the environment, full stop.
I think urban green space is great, as long as it also comes with housing density. The problem is excessive greenspace coupled with mandatory low-density single family dwellings. You end up creating more sprawl and more carbon emissions as the people who can't afford to live in the close-in suburbs sprawl outward.
Also, I say all of this as an environmentalist. Suburban parks do more to protect homeowner wealth than they do to protect our planet. Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, widespread habitat loss (think palm oil plantations in Borneo, not racoon territory in your backyard) are far more pressing environmental problems than suburban densification is by any stretch of the imagination.
Seeing a few trees torn down to make way for an apartment building is a very tangible loss of greenery, but it's ultimately better for the environment. Density allows people to be more efficient in their use of resources, and ultimately preserves more habitat for wildlife.
Imagine if we applied SF housing laws to the car market. Only allow a few thousand new cars to be made every year. Then say manufacturers have to pay a $10,000 fee per car they sell, in addition to taxes on their revenues. Of course the super wealthy start bidding up the price of cars - they're hard to get, and becoming expensive, so it's a status symbol to have one. Existing car owners are happy to see that their current car is going up in value, so they don't want to change anything. Since cars are now so expensive people decide to mandate affordable cars. So a lottery is set up where a handful of new cars get sold at bellow market rates to some very lucky people. This does nothing to make good cars more affordable to the vast majority of people who can no longer afford them. But it lets the people contendedly driving their valuable BMWs and Volvos pat themselves on the back for having done something.
Also, going back to housing, fast-growing metropolitan areas that have fewer zoning restrictions tend to have more affordable housing than ones that are anti-housing-construction. Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta have all seen incredible population and job growth but have housing that is far more affordable than in California.
The used car market is full of scams, and has the used-car salesmen ever been seen as a trustworthy individual? The independent used-car inspector I went through had a disclaimer that they charge extra to inspect cars on lots out on 82nd ave in Portland because of how notoriously bad they are at selling people lemons. There are many salvage sellers on Craigslist, who fail to mention how badly the car was damaged before being repaired, and those repairs are usually poorly done. Some of the cheapest options are cars with recalls that the seller never mentions in their ad.
Soap? The raw materials, use cases and costs involved with soap are so out of align with that of housing, I can't see "it works for soap" being a viable argument. In many poor neighborhoods there are "food/grocery deserts", so access to cheap soap can be an issue.
This is even more true for housing, where prices vary wildly by tens of thousands (or occasionally hundreds of thousands) of dollars for very similar quality/space/location housing.
A used car can usually purchased in a single day. A used house can take anywhere from 3-6+ weeks to purchase (from initial offer to actual possession).
And housing purchases are so unwieldy that both parties must hire their own agents and insurances (at a cost of thousands of dollars, each) to represent each of them through the entire transaction.
Purchasing processes don't get any more unfriendly than that.
> The used car market is full of scams, and has the used-car salesmen ever been seen as a trustworthy individual?
This is even more true for housing, where scams are so common that they're just automatically factored into housing costs by default as "maintenance".
It's even more insane because "multiple things quickly failing" is expected even for brand new housing. To the extreme that brand new cars typically carry a 36 months "everything" warranty, but new houses usually only carry 11-12 months of similar guarantee, despite costing 10-20x more.
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If anything, I wish the housing market was more like buying a car. Because despite all car-buying's flaws, it's at least possible for me to get something I'm fairly content with, at a price I can reasonably afford.
This. Outlawing dense, urban growth does real harm to people's lives, and to the environment. It's one of the clearest examples of xenophobia and greed coallescing to extract wealth and concentrate it in the hands of the privileged few. Just because it's, say, a crowd of mostly Bernie Sanders supporters pushing to "preserve neighborhood character" in the Berkeley hills at a local city council meeting, and not a skyscraper board room full of bankers in expensive suits, doesn't make it any less nefarious or the impact any less real.