[wwweston]

If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.

[fragmede]

zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.