Actually everyone's lives will be collectively worsened. More development means more pollution, more depletion of natural resources. What is actually sustainable is less housing, not more housing.
We have tried four decades of your "let's limit housing" plan in California. In contrast to improving people's lives, it's made everybody's lives worse, through these means:
1) massive commutes by car
2) astronomical housing prices
3) forcing people out of state due to these massive housing prices
4) increased pollution because of increased commutes from further and further exurbs
5) massive homelessness from those that aren't able to move before they run out of money, or who hit a massive car or medical expense as the struggle to pay for housing.
Take a peak at the carbon consumption of households in dense areas and suburban areas across the US:
Okay Ted, then where shall they be housed? Unless you’re planning to cull people who dare to live in apartments, they’ve got to live somewhere. I guess you think we should close the door behind you? You and your friends were the last legitimate residents. Everyone else is responsible for growth, not you?
So we’re back to the original question: rural, sub-urban or city? City living is by comparison actually the least environmentally damaging. (If you think cities are bad, wait until you try housing 8 billion people in single family homes.)
Comparing him to Thanos isn’t fair. Thanos had an actionable (albeit unpopular) solution.
This vague “actually it’s worse” nonsense is meaningless babble because it projects the problem through one simple dimension (number of houses) and ignores important things like average energy consumption per housing unit and average energy consumption for transportation.
The downvotes and comments seem to be rather narrow minded. As the Wachowski's pointed out (years ago now) in the voice of agent Smith "You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
This point of view seems far more narrow minded, to the point where it doesn't even deal with problems it claims to be concerned about.
If you are concerned about "multiplying," then refusing to build housing does nothing to fix that. People living in cities with high incomes ans education and freedom to control their lives have fewer children than those who are poorer and live in less developed parts of the world. If you actually care about "multiplying" then you should be encouraging as many people as possible to move into urban areas for the greater economic, educational, and general awareness of the number of humans around them.
Secondly, if you are the least bit concerned about natural resources, you should also be encouraging more people to live in urban areas, where they consumer far less resources, far less fossil fuels, and generally have far less impact on nature.
Thirdly, that quote from a fictional character is just utter bullshit. Nobody is leaving Vancouver because they consumed all the resources, quite the opposite. People want to move there from other places, and not spread out. Opposition to projects like this forces people to spread out against their will.
The only thing opposition to this project does is increase environmental impact of people, reduce their happiness and access to the high value resources of the city, and most crucially of all to current power holders, put people out of sight while they consume more and are less happy for it.
So really, opposition to projects like this can only be viewed as an extreme form of greed. Adding in supposed concerns about nature, or multiplying, just points out that a person is just fine with both of things, as long as it's not insight. That is a fundamentally thoughtless, selfish, and asocial way to view the world, and it has caused immense harm over the last few decades.
