>local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most. Local optimization is not t

>local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most. Local optimization is not the best strategy, even according to the those doing the local optimizations. Both participants in a Prisoner's Dilemma are better off if they hand their decision-making over to a third party, conditional on the other person also doing so. The Bay Area as a whole wants affordable housing, they just don't want to make the Bay as a whole better off by making unfair sacrifices in their neighborhood. It's a classic coordination problem, caused in large part because decision-making is too local compared to the regional benefits of housing construction.