The fundamental issue is the incentives. When someone who owns a home says no to increasing zoning, their net worth goes up. It's verrry hard to go upstream and

The fundamental issue is the incentives. When someone who owns a home says no to increasing zoning, their net worth goes up. It's verrry hard to go upstream and fight that. I'm for those changes, and would vote for them, but the people incentivized to fight will gish gallop till the cows come home. If you shut down one, they will invent some other reason that zoning should not be increased. The only way to fix this is to tax the land equal to what it's worth - occupying or not, foreign owned or not - such that the sale price of the home is equal to the cost to build the housing on top of it. Once that's true, and saying no means they pay more, they will only actually say no to things that actually make them happier, and I'm all for that if they are willing to pay for it. But the most likely cause is that they would suddenly vote to up-zone and would allow for denser housing, and over time the tax would drop.