In my experience these people will call anything with a flat roof or anything taller than 35’ a “tower”

A lot of which is addressable, to some extent, but who’s going to pay for the mitigation when housing development spends as little as it can get away with? It’s a business venture, and you get the biggest return on investment by building cheap and selling expensive, not by throwing away money placating the people next door.

… but even so, as much as I’d be pissed about it, I’d also understand that neighborhoods change, it’s inevitable, and to some extent intrusion by neighbors is part of the price for living in town. I could live out in the country, in a spot where I can walk out my front door and not see evidence of another human being - but I choose not to, because there are trade offs that come with that too.

So idk. It would be nice if new development were somehow incentivized to cater to the comfort of their new neighbors. But I’m not sure how exactly to enact that.

Watch this pod save America interview if you want to hear directly from the folks in California fighting to reduce the amount of housing built.