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Oh they get it, they’re just looking out for themselves. Property owners account for 72% of the voting block and have strong roots in the community where renters tend to be more transient [1]. In America, as a property owner, your home is probably your largest investment. The perception here for better or worse is that more housing means less demand for yours, so you lose money. It’s like wondering why the foxes don’t vote for razor wire around the chicken coops. Not in a malicious way, it’s just not in their interests.

The corollary is that the people pushing for vertical building and high density housing, while dressing the issue up as being about the homeless, are also looking out for their best interests. They want a better place to live, where they want to live, where they can make 6-figure salaries in the sun. It’s important to realize that this isn’t a matter of chickens and foxes, and there’s a reason why the focus is inevitably in areas where they can earn the most and where they would like to live.

The truth is that every aspect of this debate is shrouded in hypocrisy, because otherwise it boils down to people wanting massive new infrastructure to support their desires, or people supporting a deeply imperfect status quo because they’re already winners in it. One side justifies their desire for a slice of the pie by looking to trickle-down economics for housing, clsiming that they care about the less fortunate. The claims that the techies making their property even more valuable through demand are a plague of locust ruining their fair cities. Both are more or less full of it.

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