Here's the theory-level question yimbies havent answered: why should 10 million ppl who want to be in, say, Boston for totally banal, horde-like reasons get to have a say about what the future shape of that city will be, rather than the people who own the city? What is yimbies' larger polticial theory which disfavors the preferences of owners (who want Boston kept "artificially" small and pricey) and favors the preferences of this vast abstract horde? I could see a communist answer to the question: the owners of the city should lose their ownership because they're now "historically obsolete"'...a state apparatus dominated by workers' organizations should grab all the land...etc etc etc. Sure. But last I checked, yimbies arent communists! They say they believe in capitalism. And if you're taking capitalist property rights seriously, then why arent you taking seriously owners' rights to do what they want with the physical environment that they own? If what owners want to do is pool political resources to set up zoning laws they like, then this is just spirit of capital doing its thing, isn't it? Since when does big capital not get to set anything up as exclusive? And BTW, in the "communist" version of the thought experiment, I am not sure the communist state would tear down historical Boston to put up giant housing boxes everywhere. Maybe they'd do that (producing the kinds of cities China has), or maybe they'd preserve it as some kind of "dialectical political symbol," like the Soviets did with St Petersburg (Petrograd) or Novgorod.