As long as density is an abstraction tied to scary other people you have not met personally, the term will continue to be a problem.

Let's show the actual benefit of more neighbors for in town neighborhoods. If we build modest projects for which the technical "density" is an afterthought, a secondary fun fact.

With higher density we need to build with a higher attention to good design and delivery.

I am just 6 years older than Brad Pitt. We are the same height and close to the same weight. In strict terms we have the same zoning and density, but the quality of the experience is valued differently.

The point is that how buildings are designed, how they are placed on their parcels, blocks, streets and neighborhoods adds or detracts from the quality of the experience. How buildings are described during the approval process really does matter.

If the only newly constructed apartment buildings local people has seen in recent memory are crappy "garden apartment"s” behind the Walmart out by the highway (built at 14 dwelling units per acre) That becomes the unfortunate yardstick to measure any apartment proposal. if you describe your proposed Four-Plex on a 5,000 SF infill lot as a rectangle on a rectangular site delivering 38 Dwelling Units Per Acre, people will freak out because that would obviously be more than twice as awful as the crappy garden apartments out by the highway at 14DUA.

If apartments are discussed as an unfortunate commodity that brings large numbers of undesirable humans then the usual response is "Don't build that here". Or it may be more long the lines of "If you have to build that here, build less of it and give us a big landscaped buffer to apologize for the crappy buildings".

We have dumbed down the process of getting civilization built into a silly abstract debate about numbers that don't mean anything in the real world.

If we are not a wicked people, then I suspect that we are an ignorant people when we act as a group...