Many people are not comfortable with the social environment of large >20-unit housing developments. The thing is, it's relatively easy to take full advantage of a 55-foot zoning ceiling (higher than nearly all of LA and most of SF as well) with buildings that have five or fewer units and entrances on the outside (possibly from a balcony). The reason large projects account for such a large proportion of units in development has a lot to do with the regulatory environment and high fixed costs of putting up a building (especially fees) which create barriers that can only be overcome by the kinds of large projects that most people don't like.

Parking requirements don't help, although I suspect that housing without parking tends to be a temporary residence; once the occupant can afford a car, they start trying to move. Building housing without parking is better if people can still own cars in spillover parking, but actually building spillover parking runs into the NIMBY problem where nobody wants to live near it. As a result the market for standalone parking spaces is extremely constrained and that's unlikely to change.

It's true that some people are just anti-growth but there are legitimate concerns being aired about the way that development seems to be going. Since the housing market is emphatically not free it's easy to see how the normal tendency of the market to give people what they want could be stymied and result in discontent. I started to think this way when, after about two years of pro-housing activism in San Francisco, I realized that:

- a lot of housing projects are opposed by the very sort of people they're supposed to be helping

- a lot of those people seem to be unhappy about the lifestyle the project offers them, or they find it unacceptable ("no pets, no smoking") and conclude they're being "pushed out" as "undesirables".

I can't deny that those are legitimate concerns. After all, I like pets and smoking. I also drive a car. How can I possibly ignore people who are mad that they're not allowed to have pets or smoke and it's becoming very hard to own a car? And this is why I say "people are not comfortable with the social environment". There are other concerns: noise, and low-noise requirements. Some people hate noise. Other people love to make noise. Should we plan for them to be separated by four inches of drywall? Is that even planning? Furthermore, poor people might benefit from collectivism, but they still like individualism. It's not surprising, considering our cultural history and capitalist economy, and the tendency of primates to imitate the behavior of high-status primates, that people like to "own" things and distinguish themselves and are turned off by the rhetoric of "community" (the trendy euphemism for "apartment building") and public spaces, especially when it comes time for them to find somewhere to live. It's easier to be an existentialist in an attic than an apartment. And it's these concerns that have made renting bearable in the first place: a lot of tenant's rights law has ultimately been justified by the American ideal that a person should be secure in their dwelling. That's not something I'd like to see go away.

The truth is, the majority of anti-housing advocates are not very good at economics and they don't really understand why the current policies are failing them. You can't figure out how to help people without figuring out how to help whiny, selfish, stupid people, because that's literally all of people. If the pro-growth side of the table continues to expect lifestyle to just happen while all the regulations focus on the numbers game, it's not going to happen, and people are still going to be mad at us. They have a good reason to be mad. They just don't know what to do about it.