YOU DON'T KNOW whether to laugh or cry. It never seems to occur to such people that greenbelts are one of the big reasons why housing is not affordable in much of coastal California. That same kind of housing in San Francisco or Palo Alto would probably have cost two or three thousand dollars a month. As the realtors say, the three big factors in housing prices are location, location and location.
Greenery is nice.
Open space is nice. It is nice to have buildings that are not too tall. There are all sorts of nice requirements you can put on builders before granting them permits to build. There is no cash register ringing as the costs of all these nice things keep adding up. It is all done with a wave of the government's magic wand.