All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.
> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.
For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.
> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.
If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.
This to me is the least compelling counter-argument possible. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.
Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.
If you don't own a car, you don't determine when to wash it.
If you don't own a property, you totally still get to determine what to do with it by being a whiny neighbor. Why is this OK?
I'm very-much onboard with the "put up or shut up" model of zoning. If you want the place to be empty, you should own it and keep it empty.
People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.
Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.
It's a good thing.