No need to be obnoxious. Just say that your opinion/experience is different.

It seems natural to me that the majority of emotions regarding one's home and community are in regards to the idea of home and community, rather than their monetary value, since that's the obvious human perspective. And of course you can care about both things at once, which maybe you assumed I was omitting? I only said the the majority of people care about their home/community, and implied that I believe it's the stronger emotion, not that the majority of people do not also care about the investment (which does materially affect their actual life, as opposed to the more common image of a wealthy "investor").

I could be wrong. It's a sentiment, so it's not something easily measured (unless you fall for the trap of over-interpreting statistics, which is common in an engineering-minded folks).

Development raises land value. That's the entire reason it's done, after all. Look at the cost of land in Manhattan vs suburban Atlanta. In the supply-choked cities in the US, development isn't gonna tank the wealth of land-owners, quite the opposite. There are exceptions, but they're "this is the largest available plot in Beverly Hills"-style outliers.

What people want, even in those denser supply-choked cities, is basically just stability. "I don't want to be forced out because a bunch of rich people move in next door, and I don't want it it turn into something dramatically different experience-wise than what I bought."

If everyone in those areas just wanted to maximize the financial side they'd be looking to flip their single family home for a fourplex and put the profit into another, etc etc.

"We don't want this to turn into Manhattan" is NOT what anyone owning land in a maybe-could-turn-into-Manhattan place if they were just interested in the money.

(That's less viable in the middle-of-the-country suburbs because the "increased land value" of the old empty pasture next door could still result in lower land value for your on-the-suburban-fringe neighborhood, if there's high amounts of empty land and more new identical suburbs popping up. But that's not where the problem is most acute, anyway!)