It depends what happens, I guess. If they throw up 3 story houses at the bottom of your garden, your view of the estuary goes and the traffic outside your house increases threefold, then the reasons why you bought the house in the first place rapidly vanish. Neither of those happened to us, by the way, the people it happened to had the massive show houses at the other end of the estate- our part was already fully developed.
It also doesn't help when the developer promises to leave a certain amount of green space, then decides to count the area of the grass verges on the pavement in the total...