For those motivated purely by fear of their home no longer increasing in value, faster than inflation, a scheme like this might help soften their opposition. U

For those motivated purely by fear of their home no longer increasing in value, faster than inflation, a scheme like this might help soften their opposition. Unfortunately, the coalition of people who oppose housing is not purely financially motivated. There our groups of people for whom low density living is all about status and excluding others, and there is no amount of money that would compensate them for loss of status and exclusion. There are others for whom the argument is purely aesthetic or sentimental - they legit cannot imagine any type of nice neighbourhood composed the buildings that are single-family homes with triangle roofs. Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort, while simultaneously being luxury housing. Many fear increased traffic, but will also oppose any effort to limit cars. Others just fear change of any kind. I have been to more housing hearings than I can count, and the reasons people oppose housing are myriad. I don’t think there’s any sort of silver bullet to lessen opposition, and I suspect people have been opposing housing for as long as housing has existed. What I think went wrong is that we gave people an unusually powerful set of tools in the 20th century to really lock down the aggregate total of floor space that it’s possible to build in a given region, so there’s almost no wiggle room. We made the default that building is unusual and bad, and put the onus on builders to justify construction, rather than forcing opponents to justify using government power to ban construction. To get out of it, we either need to abolish this set of tools, or at least raise the default so significantly that it is higher than any foreseeable demand. Not only does this accomplish the goal of simply allowing housing to be built, but by ensuring that the amount that can be built is much higher than any amount anyone would ever want to build, it removes the leverage of landholders. No particular plot is more special than any other simply because the government said so.