[closeparen]

Living close to work has a drastically smaller infrastructure footprint than living far from work. Arguing against an urban development on traffic grounds is essentially always in bad faith: if the potential residents can’t take up space in your neighborhood, they will take up space on your freeway. Neighborhoods can scale; roads can’t.

Every third sentence out of the YIMBY camp is about the effect of urban density in communities: how complete streets, walkable businesses, public space, etc. bring us both physically and socially closer together, walking back the hyperatomization of drive-alone commuting and automobile-scaled environments.

[throwaway5752]

I'm not the tone police, but I don't see how that is a de facto bad faith point. I think your "potential residents .. will take up space on your freeway" as being way too reductionist. First, there's light rail which has a global and domestic track record of mitigating this. Second, "potential" residents can move elsewhere. There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want.

I think your second paragraph has great points about what makes a good/livable community, and is closer to what I think zoning should take into account.

[closeparen]

>There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want.

That's essentially what's being litigated in this debate. YIMBYism argues that there is such an ethical principal: society ought to be inclusive, the playing field ought to be level, haves ought not to have too much power over have-nots, etc. We contend that they apply just as much to urban land use as to healthcare, immigration, and tax policy.

Modern zoning is a deployment of state power to help reinforce and grow the asset values of a small group who were in the right place at the right time, valuing their aesthetic enjoyment above others' ability to make a living. Maybe we don't have a positive obligation to create an unlimited amount of affordable housing, but we at least have the obligation not to use the power of the state this way.