People will talk about "protecting property values", but I'm going to claim that's not the underlying motivation. 1. The history is easy, these rules were crea

People will talk about "protecting property values", but I'm going to claim that's not the underlying motivation. 1. The history is easy, these rules were created originally to maintain racial segregation. The Color of Law covers this in detail. For a shorter form, check out https://grist.org/cities/zoned-out-one-womans-half-century-fight-to-desegregate-berkeley/ https://grist.org/cities/zoned-out-one-womans-half-century-f... 2. Upzoning a property makes it more valuable. It's giving back property rights to the owner. There's no cost to the owner, but now large developers are a potential buyer. The _real_ selfish move is to demand that ONLY my property is upzoned. When municipalities consider upzoning, we don't see 2. Instead we get people talking about "destroying" the neighborhood. Renters are referred to as transients. Occasionally the mask comes of and we hear about "those people". When people genuinely think those things are going to happen, they also think their property value will go down. It's like people talking about the civil war in terms of state's rights instead of slavery. Makes perfect sense if you think of slaves as property. Edit: To be clear, I think there's a lot of people that think of single family housing as a "lifestyle" that they prefer and are not necessarily bad people. However those with the most visceral reaction that actually become activists tend to be a combination of racist and classist.