Let's play this back, because I think it's you whose position keeps changing with no engagement with my responses. You started by claiming that if enough people want something (e.g. SFZ), they should be able to vote it into law:

> if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is!

(For starters, that is not how American democracy works. There are plenty of policies that are not allowable and should not be allowable merely because they have popular support. I'm sure you can name a few.)

I pointed out that "enough" people only want SFZ if you control who the relevant population is. In aggregate, Californians are perfectly happy with ending SFZ, and policies to do so like SB50 poll quite well. You are simultaneously claiming: if a cul de sac by popular vote prefers SFZ, it should be able to impose it on any objecting landowner in the cal de sac, but if the residents of California by popular vote prefer that San Francisco zone for more housing, they shouldn't. These are inconsistent at face unless you specify and defend a distinction between immediate and regional neighbors, which you haven't.

Next, I pointed out that the residents of California are already dictating what gets built in the SFBA. I gave you an example of a law supported by the state legislative representatives from Modesto that forced Cupertino to increase its housing stock by nearly 10% with a single project, over the long-standing objections of Cupertino city council members and voters (the Vallco project went to the city ballot in 2018 and was voted down). Your response to this was that a 10% increase in Cupertino's housing stock does not solve a 50 year shortage so it's not a meaningful example of state policy dictating what is built locally. Not only is this irrelevant (your argument is invalidated by an existence proof, which I provided), but wrong: I gave you a reference for how state policy on land use will be increasingly more important than local policy in coming years.

You also asked why it's fair for "all the citizens of California (or the USA)" to have a stake in local land use. I pointed out that: (i) they interact with the local economy (ii) they have a stake in the consequences of those policies (iii) they may even _want to_ live locally but cannot because they are priced out (iv) SFZ is justified legally in Euclid by its ability to mitigate a small set of very specific issues, none of which include "neighborhood preference." These are all separately great arguments for why they should. You have not engaged with any.

I went ahead and made a stronger claim that land use is a national matter. You asked how that's the case. I pointed out that suburban subdivisions are Federal policy, and anyone who can influence how Fannie and Freddie guarantee loans implicitly dictates what type of home is built locally. You responded by saying that is a future hypothetical even though this policy is the status quo.

Given all that, I think it's reasonable to conclude that you're the one who has strayed from defending the your original point (which was, roughly, "the immediate neighbors of a property should have the exclusive right to decide what can be built on it - that's democracy!").