[mchusma]

Not OP but Good question! a big part of NIMBY is driven by how much people's net worth is tied into their residence. So IMO you need to reduce this. It starts with convincing people that real estate is on average not a great investment. There is no way for primary residences to universally (1) be a good investment by beating inflation rate and (2) be more affordable.

This is more of a "cultural" thing, and I think most important.

Following that, in practice there are supply side and demand side methods of driving down the cost of living. The big ones are probably maximum height requirements, minimum parking requirements, and minimum size requirements.

[trinovantes]

I definitely think it's a cultural problem

China is probably the most extreme end of real-estate-as-an-investment mentality. Even without NIMBYism and zoning laws, everybody invests in real estate because it's impossible to make money off the stock market without insider government knowledge i.e. the government can destroy entire industries overnight like the recent private education bans. They're experimenting with increasing property taxes for each non-primary residence but only time will tell if it'll work.

Unfortunately, culture will take multiple decades/generations to change so the current generation are essentially out of luck if they are not in a high income career or have rich parents

[stackedinserter]

Ok, you convinced me that real estate is not a good investment. I'm not going to invest into it. But I still don't want my house to become twice cheaper overnight because city decided to build landfill nearby.