The human consequences of artificially expensive housing extend even to some of the affluent people living in communities with sky-high housing costs. For example, elderly people in such communities -- especially those who are ailing and homebound -- are often isolated from their children.
Young adults who have not yet reached their peak earnings years usually cannot afford to live in such communities near their parents, unless they live in their parents' homes.
People like teachers and policemen, which every community must have, can seldom afford to live where they work, when housing costs are out of sight, and so must commute from a long way away, sometimes spending 3 or 4 hours a day driving to and from work on crowded highways.
All sorts of lofty talk about "open space" or "saving the green foothills" is used to disguise the plain fact that those who already have theirs want to keep other people out, especially other people not as upscale as themselves.
Ugly as such selfishness may be, it is no worse than the zealotry of the nature cultists who join with them to make life miserable for thousands of other people in order to give themselves a cheap sense of importance that some confuse with idealism.
The irony in much of California is that the "green foothills" that environmental zealots wax poetic about are in fact brown half the year. The absence of rainfall during the California summer means that these hills are covered with ugly withered grass.
The only places where there is green grass during these dry months are places artificially watered by people -- which is to say, mostly places where there is housing.