High house prices are a moral and economic disaster, as the post-2008 recession has shown us. The problem at the root of NIMBY is that real estate prices and behaviors have a few positive-feedback loops:

1. Because real estate "always goes up", and because Americans are delusional in general and seem to have a housing fetish, people have the deluded belief that they aren't paying for housing but investing in something that will always appreciate. This mentality creates bubbles. By the way, we're still in a real estate bubble-- just in a valley of one, and the "star" locations have barely dipped (yet).

2. Because people have absurd quantities (often over 30% of income and 80% of wealth) of their resources invested in housing, they have strong economic incentives toward NIMBYism. If I were going to lose 50c/dollar on 90% of my net worth (assuming I had any, but that's another story... don't work for shitty startups, kids) because of a speed limit change, I'd be pretty pissed too. The real problem is not locational change (necessary) but overinvestment in an asset that is highly sensitive to such change. It's simply not wise to invest 90% of your wealth in an asset whose value can plummet because some piece of shit decides to clear-cut a nearby hill and ruin your view... but some people have no other choice because housing is so stupidly expensive.

3. NIMBYism actually forces property values to stay high. Housing should be worth about $100-125 per square-foot, with about a 50-100% premium for top locations (urban areas) due to increased construction costs and reduced transportation costs (proximity to desirable places). Housing over $250/ft^2 would be an extreme anomaly were it not for outright regulatory corruption (read: NIMBY). However, due to the extreme price inelasticity of housing, even slight scarcities (1-2 percent) cause huge upward movements in prices. Hence the price levels observed in Manhattan and Silicon Valley.

The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder up behind them.

People also tend to inappropriately overvalue land, given how easily its value can be reduced to near-zero by nearby goings-on over which one has no control. For most land-- a very small set of trophy locations being excepted-- the value is a function of proximity and the fair value can be determined from transportation costs for an average working person in that area, and land would be pretty close to free (in comparison to the construction costs for the house itself) except for the artificial scarcity imposed by NIMBYism.

It ends very badly. Bubbles, cultural rot, and urban decay. People associate expensive real estate with success, but the most expensive city (real estate wise) is Luanda, where more than half of the residents are in poverty. Moscow and Sao Paulo aren't cheap, either, even though those cities have massive poverty problems.