Because they only are responsible for the property they own and not the property/land next door? It might make financial (or even quality-of-life-related) sense for a property owner to fight against construction next door, but I can't think up any reasonable or legal justification for why a property owner should have the power to prohibit construction next door...
It's just a matter of degree. You're drawing an arbitrary line here. Nobody is prohibiting anybody from construction, they're prohibiting certain types of construction. You can build a house, it just has to follow the rules and guidelines that the community has established.
It's a pretty common thing in the United States. There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
The area has housing problems, no doubt about it, I'm not arguing that they don't, but there is clear legal, and social precedent for establishing rules for communities throughout the United States.
Indeed. Communities can collaborate to keep things the way they'd like them by leveraging local networks. One particular and exciting example of this sort of policy is Redlining[1]. Agreements such as height limits aren't as bad (and are less explicitly racist), but it's a similar sort of idea. I understand the reasons why someone would want this for their neighborhood (and in most neighborhoods throughout the USA it's not a big deal), I just think in these examples where there's extreme tension between external demand and the desires of current residents, something has to give.
> There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
I'm not against historic neighborhoods in general. I live in NYC and am aware of multiple, but I feel that some, such as parts of the West Village, have been harmful to the city as a whole. The point of a historic neighborhood should be to preserve exceptional period architecture: for example, the Upper East Side historic district in the low/mid 60s preserves a particular style of late 1800s row houses[2]. Many parts of the West Village that are historic are preserving a bunch of shitty 1 or 2 story buildings constructed when the area was a slum in the teens and 20s, after half the neighborhood was torn down to build the IRT 7th Ave Line (i.e. the 1/2/3 train) that would be covered as 7th Ave South[3].
To use a historic neighborhood as a chance to "preserve community" is, I think, an extreme distortion of intent (although the ultimate result for many well-positioned historic areas is preserving a particular sort of extremely wealthy community).
