Buy the land and put it in a trust, or incorporate and establish zoning laws.

The town im in keeps developing like crazy (for who im not sure, as there’s still a decent homeless population and empty housing but anyway)

Supply and demand. Build more and prices stop rising and maybe some people without homes will be able to catch up.

There’s a housing crisis and we need more housing built everywhere. Especially dense, walkable housing. From the sound of it they’re building car-dependent sprawl around you.

Literally every piece of infrastructure. Infrastructure is everything that makes things more efficient by being so ubiquitous that it becomes practically invisible.

Sure, there are the obvious ones like clean water and electricity pumped directly to our homes. There are also other kinds of infrastructure that is less visible.

Standardized size of shipping containers, food safety regulations, a legal system that keeps companies’ worst impulses in check, HTML as a freely available spec. These are a few of the many things that enable us to have a high trust society.