[yhoneycomb]

> I don't have any way to preserve something which is singularly important to me.

Well, have you thought about buying a larger plot of land? Seems like the obvious solution if you are intent on controlling wide swaths of land surrounding your house.

[teakettle42]

Great idea. Expensive, though. What if, instead, a bunch of us buy land in the area, form a democratically-elected government, and mutually agree to limit development on that land such as to preserve the current level of density and our quality of life?

We can call this idea “zoning”.

[Pet_Ant]

Why not buy it jointly? Otherwise you are telling people who bought the land what to do with it. If you want to have a say in it, pony up for it. Buy the land in the name of the township and turn it into a park.

[teakettle42]

No, you’re limiting the externalities that an individual land owner can impose on everyone else.

[dionidium]

"Externality" is one of the most tortured terms in widespread use and it would have been better if non-economists had never heard of it. Just because you don't like something, that doesn't mean anything has been "imposed" on you. You're dangerously close to describing the existence of other human beings as an "externality" that needs to be solved for, a view with a less-than-stellar track record.

[dionidium]

The reason we put some things in a Constitution is that we think those things are so important that they aren't subject to the whims of the electorate -- they aren't up to a vote. You don't get to have a vote about which religion will be the state religion. You don't get to vote away my right to Free Speech. And you shouldn't get to vote to limit my Constitutionally-defined private property rights.

Of course human beings want to restrict what other people do on their own land. History is full of groups of people just, you know, taking land whenever they think it suits their purposes. That's why the right to private property is in the Constitution. It's why Euclid was wrongly decided. And it's why you don't get to appeal to "democracy" in an attempt to abridge a fundamental right.

[heyitsanewacco]

Oh cool, so as a suburbanite I get a vote too?

No?

Oh great, I guess I'll be commuting 2 hours to get to an office that is walking distance for my boss.

[everdrive]

In practice I'm looking to do exactly this.

I think there's a big difference in this case between what I should practically do to meet my goals and the philosophical argument at issue. In other words, even if I always lose the philosophical argument, I can simply try to buy some large plot of rural land as you suggest.

Philosophically, I worry about what happens when density is the only choice left for people, and a large majority of them don't or won't understand why that might be so unpalatable for a significant minority of people.

[novok]

Move to a rural place where everyone is moving out and you'll find a place that is not densifying over time, but the opposite. And buying land & housing there is incredibly cheap, probably less than the cost it would be to build it! This is pretty much happening in every small-ish town in japan for example.

Your social life and neighbors will more skew towards the grey haired spectrum, but that is the sacrifice you will need to make!