It's an incentives issue, not a community input issue.
If the only value you are able to hold onto is the development you do yourself, then you aren't going to block your neighbours from building up their property.
Members of the community have incentives to prevent high speed rail and apartment towers being built near them. The general population has incentives to build high speed and apartment towers in those neighborhoods.
But, because of community input, the voice of local busybodies is louder than that of the general population. It is a a disservice to democracy and prevents our governments from functioning in a way that serves the people.
Incentives have nothing to do with it. Until the community recognizes that other people have rights and that rights are rights precisely because you need no "community input" (which is an euphemism for "political interference") in order to exercise them, the results will be the same.
While developing a piece of real estate can cause a good deal of damage to the character of a community, ideas are much more dangerous in that regard.
Why is it then, that we allow for unscrupulous capitalists to disseminate ideas freely? Why isn't there "community input" into the things newspapers are allowed to publish?
If the only value you are able to hold onto is the development you do yourself, then you aren't going to block your neighbours from building up their property.