&gt; People don&#x27;t fight upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate<p>You didn&#x27;t read what I said carefully enough.  People fight _nearby_ upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate.  Upzoning of their actual land increases its value, of course.<p>Agreed on people fighting upzoning of their own land because it would change the surroundings in a way they find undesirable.<p>By &quot;people trying to enter the market&quot;, I mean the housing market, not the real estate purchase market.  That is, people trying to find a place to live.  It&#x27;s quite rare for people first moving out of their parents&#x27; house to do so by buying a house themselves; they typically rent.  The result is that there are tons of places in the US (including San Francisco) where people have to move far away from their relatives when they move out on their own because there is nowhere nearby that is a viable place to live.<p>As for that last.... that&#x27;s true if you exclude the interests of the children of the community (which are nearly always excluded; once the kids finish college they&#x27;re on their own and typically shut out of the community).  It&#x27;s also true if you ignore the fact that some of these communities (and the Bay Area is particularly bad about it) try to create lots of employment opportunities but without the corresponding housing.  This leads to hellish commutes for everyone, including the members of the community in question, lots of complaining, and poorer quality of life than you would have otherwise.<p>There are some unpleasant tradeoffs here, for sure.  The problem is that some people refuse to acknowledge that the tradeoffs even exist and to discuss what the right tradeoff is.  They insist that nothing must ever change, period, and it never occurs to them that this means that their commute will suck more and more and their kids will not be able to live near them.<p>Note that I say this as someone who lives in a suburb.  I like it here.  I would not be terribly happy with upzoning myself.  And yet I&#x27;m watching a lot of the resulting problems play out (including people who grew up in the town being completely priced out of it).  It&#x27;s not pretty, and upzoning sure would help some of those problems.