Moving to the suburbs is not enough. These fights are often about developers wanting to roll into existing suburban areas and stacking dense housing in them.

Why? Moving is expensive, stressful, and potentially fraught with risks as any major change in life can be. You do that, all while knowing with certainty that of the 7+ billion on Earth, few would move to accommodate you.

So why? Out of the unrequited goodness of your heart?

Because a higher level of government recognizes that maintaining your neighbors’ lots exactly as they are in perpetuity is destructive to society as a whole.

Right, and it’s an adversarial process between that higher level of government, and local interests. What you’re suggesting is akin to asking people to forgoe the use of an attorney during criminal proceedings. The idea is that competing interests can find compromise where necessary, or at least that the adversarial nature of the process is preferable to alternatives.

Having apartment buildings along transit corridors in your neighborhood is really nothing like being convicted of a crime. The right to due process protects you from imprisonment, not neighborhood change.