True in a way but not entirely. I'm house hunting now and I'm finding too many of what I call "projects in the country", hundreds of townhouses or condos crammed on several acres surrounded by woods or fields. These units are so close together they can't get top price but they make it up in volume. These to me are the future breeders of suburban crime.
Then you have the single family home developements. Here they cram expensive homes on small lots barely able to contain the home. Houses that should be on 2 or 3 acres are stuffed into .25 or .30 acre lots. They charge an arm and a leg to pay for the extra land they must keep green, so you pay for the land but it just isn't yours. This also keeps the riff-raff out that buy the townhomes and condos above. Included in both is of course your monthly lot rental in the form of HOA fees.
It's amazing that the older communities managed to keep their value and have beautiful green streets and yards without all those regulations that cause the above housing nightmares. I know where I'll buy.
I live in a California town that brags it's "planned." When we bought our house I thought single-home density couldn't become much greater but I was wrong! Now they're building houses that practically touch each other and escapees from L.A. are buying them frantically at prices from $250,000 to $500,000 and up. Our older and rather more modest home is in a development surrounded by a lovely greenbelt -- one of the main inducements to our locating here.
There's an interesting twist. The home-development division of a huge lumber company is basically in cahoots with the city. We thought we'd moved to a settled community but now every spare scrap of land is being turned into high-density condos or apartments with the city's blessing. The greenbelt we love so much and which we thought would be there forever is now being eyed for the kind of very high density apartments you mention as future crime-breeders. We're fighting it like crazy but the lumber company has the funds and lawyers to wage an unending campaign. We'll lose in the long run.
I favor property rights, too, but I've lived long enough to become very cynical. When certain city council and planning commission members campaign for reelection, slick well-financed campaigns appear out of nowhere: fancy signs, TV commercials, etc. The money for all that has to come from somewhere, and it's not out of the politicians' own pockets. They're bought and paid for by the development interests. It makes sense: if you can get $350,000 for a house built on an acre of land, why not get $1,400,000 for four houses built on the same space? At that price, buying a few politicians is a bargain. So there are two sides to the issue, as always.