City Observatory has a long article arguing against the idea that a right-left consensus is emerging against zoning, making the obvious point that existing homeowners fight zoning changes when they perceive they might affect their investment, which often makes up a large part of their savings.

homeowners dominate local development politics in large part because their homes make up such a large proportion of their total wealth that any decline in property values could devastate them. (Or, conversely, cut into huge capital gains, if they are lucky enough to own property in, say, San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.) As a result, they’re extremely wary of any change to their surroundings that might reduce their property values—and zoning gives them the legal ability to stop those changes.

So even to the extent that there’s a consensus about the damage of zoning among policy wonks, part of that consensus is also that zoning is incredibly difficult to change, because the interest local homeowners have in preserving it is so powerful…

When housing decisions are made hyper-locally, the only interests taken into account are those of nearby residents, who may have worries about their property values, the visual “character” of the neighborhood, or even more directly exclusionary concerns about the type of people who will leave near them. It also creates a sort of “prisoner’s dilemma” in which no neighborhood wants to be stuck with “undesirable,” or costly, land uses. But when decisions are made at a broader geographic level, the people who stand to gain from new housing—renters and potential buyers who want more housing options, businesses that might gain more customers, and people thinking about how more density might support the regional transit system—also get to have a voice. Scholars of zoning and segregation have argued that more local fragmentation in decisionmaking is a crucial part of using land use laws to impede integration.

The basic idea the “policy wonks” are proposing is kindergarten simple – when zoning restricts the supply of something, the price of that thing goes up, and some people who would like to have that thing have to do without. So what we need to do is find ways to promote zoning rules that allow residential density to increase, and commercial intensity to increase along with it, without allowing drastic, sudden changes in the character of the neighborhood.