[arcticbull]

> What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?

Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.

> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.

For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.

> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.

[Xeronate]

I think many people would consider Tokyo an overbuilt hellscape and never want to live there. I much prefer Santa Monica.

[arcticbull]

Obviously not the 14M people who live in Tokyo. Those buildings aren't empty! Population of Santa Monica is 91,000, which is what the population of Tokyo would be if nobody wanted to live there :)

If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.

This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.

Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.