You only bring a proposal to a planning session if it's close enough to existing zoning that the variance might be considered reasonable.

Dramatic upzoning is only brought to the table when the NIMBYs are seen as weak enough that it might stand a chance.

Plus, you can’t just go into an area with infrastructure capable of supporting 10k people and Just Add Housing™. What about the electric grid? Water and sewer? Schools, parking, trash pickup, etc. You have to have a plan to update all of these. The simple solution of just building urban apartment blocks everywhere won’t work.

We’ve built cities before, we can do it again. Infrastructure is cheaper with economies of scale than in sprawl. Remember, the people you don’t house still exist and live somewhere.

What a sad perspective. How did anything ever get built in the first place?

>What about the electric grid? Water and sewer? Schools, parking, trash pickup, etc.

Property taxes can pay for these updates once the additional housing is built, it's self-financing. (Of course this won't work in CA, due to Prop 13. But then again, it was a ballot initiative, and those crazy folks in California voted for it. It's all self-inflicted pain on their part.)

The usual response here is that existing residents shouldn’t be taxed to pay for later arrivals’ infrastructure needs.