Americans have so much of their wealth sunk in their real estate / home that they eye any change with deep suspicion and an eye on how it affects their home value. Surely, a 5 story building next to your ranch home is going to lower your home value, so it must not happen.

I think this is a dilemma that everybody in the Bay Area faces: you can universally agree that more housing and especially more dense housing needs to be built, but you can't allow it to be built near you because that drags your home value down. Even just a 5% drop in value may be all the equity you built if you are a recent buyer.

I guess a compromise might be to give people near these new buildings a property tax rebate as counterbalance. Also, instead of mandating parking, maybe you mandate that people moving into spaces designed to be near public transit not register cars there.