Yes, you'll expend resources to protect resources, but that's not the issue.
NIMBY is always an argument about character, not price.
You live where you live -- meaning you can't avoid the influences around you.
So you pick a place with good influences, and protect them.
High density requires defenses against the combinatoric explosion of risk of bad faith actions by others. Defenses are emotionally and financially costly.
Low density - being influenced by people within the Dunbar limit of 150 people you can know - means those defenses can be shared. Every actor is disciplined by the fact that everyone knows what others are doing.
But depending on your needs, there should be enough social variety to be interesting without being threatening. It's unlikely in a monoculture town (of factory farms or government jobs), but possible in a university town, or an area of high economic diversity - Palo Alto or Manhattan.
For those with the courage and the blinders to live in the city, their neighborhood can be a kind of small town. But I suspect this can change with a traumatic experience, or if you are responsible for people who are more attacked/less defended (young, old, female, discriminated...). So people move to the suburbs, or to gated communities or to buildings with a doorman. This is just as true of the ultra-wealthy on Aspen mountain-tops as it is for the homeless who prefer certain doorways.
If home is your castle, your neighborhood is your moat - worth defending.
None of this matters if property taxes are aligned with actual value. If people want to pay the taxes to preserve their low density township, fair enough. The issue is that in CA, we've created a system where density is disconnected from land value, so there is effectively no incentives to use land efficiently. Unsurprisingly, we see vast amounts of sprawl in California.
Facilitating the development of sprawl has negligible exteralities in the short run, but is terrible externalities in the long run.
I've said this once, I've said it a hundred times. The NIMBYs are penny-smart-pound-foolish in their war against incremental density. The political model of CA's housing crisis is not a pendulum swinging back-and-forth. The housing crisis is two generations of pent up demand, finally getting the political power to do something about it. The better allusion is that of a cascade, a dam breaking. Every unit added to these intransigent cities will be occupied by a person previously blocked from home-ownership, and more likely to support more development. Every state law passed that forces these towns to add housing undermines their ability to block it further.
The NIMBYs can build the foundations of the dam, but they won't be able to control the fallout when it breaks, and it will be swift and unpleasant. Creating sustainable, incremental systems is the only way to prevent this in the long run... but that requires a concept of stewardship and common wealth, which is contrary to the NIMBY ideology.
NIMBY is always an argument about character, not price.
You live where you live -- meaning you can't avoid the influences around you.
So you pick a place with good influences, and protect them.
High density requires defenses against the combinatoric explosion of risk of bad faith actions by others. Defenses are emotionally and financially costly.
Low density - being influenced by people within the Dunbar limit of 150 people you can know - means those defenses can be shared. Every actor is disciplined by the fact that everyone knows what others are doing.
But depending on your needs, there should be enough social variety to be interesting without being threatening. It's unlikely in a monoculture town (of factory farms or government jobs), but possible in a university town, or an area of high economic diversity - Palo Alto or Manhattan.
For those with the courage and the blinders to live in the city, their neighborhood can be a kind of small town. But I suspect this can change with a traumatic experience, or if you are responsible for people who are more attacked/less defended (young, old, female, discriminated...). So people move to the suburbs, or to gated communities or to buildings with a doorman. This is just as true of the ultra-wealthy on Aspen mountain-tops as it is for the homeless who prefer certain doorways.
If home is your castle, your neighborhood is your moat - worth defending.