Why would you expect anything different? Left-NIMBYism is a real - and unfortunate - thing, especially among older members of the left, and Chow's been in politics for 30 years.
I'm a pretty boring social democrat in most regards, so saying this as someone who generally holds fairly leftist views on many things: the leftist ideology, very roughly speaking, believes that government intervention results in better results for the common man than a capitalist market left to its own devices; this gestures directly towards price controls, zoning laws, every kind of regulation, and socialized housing. Leftists are deeply skeptical of market-based solutions; even basic economic principles like supply-and-demand are viewed with skepticism by association with Economics as a field, which tends to be viewed (not totally or necessarily wrongly) as a false science that's more of an ideological tool of capitalists than anything. They view profit-making and companies that seek to make profit - like developers - as fundamentally impure and in need of reining in. And because of decades of urban sprawl in North America, they associate development with environmental destruction, even though, ironically, one important way we could help save the environment is by densifying the hell out of our cities. And don't get me started on fears of gentrification - although there we're beginning to blur the line between "progressives" and leftists, but those lines are already pretty blurred.
I know enough left-NIMBYs to know that their intentions are pure - it's not a case of ladder-kickers. Just a particularly bad strain of thought that's - like you said - pretty widespread in municipal politics. Probably because NIMBYism transcends ideology in a way - there's different kinds of NIMBYism across the spectrum, always with the same outcome, and many voters will happily cross party lines to keep their neighbourhood just the way it is, thank you very much.
Happily, in my experience younger urbanists - even the left-wing ones - tend to (though don't always) recognize the excesses of left-NIMBYism.
I suppose I should've said they not intentional ladder-kickers; quite the opposite: they genuinely believe that their policies, and only their policies, will actually lead to more affordable housing.
This is in comparison to more conventional NIMBYs, who don't really care - they feel entitled to "preserve neighbourhood character", say things like "city's full, don't move here", that sort of thing.
I'm a pretty boring social democrat in most regards, so saying this as someone who generally holds fairly leftist views on many things: the leftist ideology, very roughly speaking, believes that government intervention results in better results for the common man than a capitalist market left to its own devices; this gestures directly towards price controls, zoning laws, every kind of regulation, and socialized housing. Leftists are deeply skeptical of market-based solutions; even basic economic principles like supply-and-demand are viewed with skepticism by association with Economics as a field, which tends to be viewed (not totally or necessarily wrongly) as a false science that's more of an ideological tool of capitalists than anything. They view profit-making and companies that seek to make profit - like developers - as fundamentally impure and in need of reining in. And because of decades of urban sprawl in North America, they associate development with environmental destruction, even though, ironically, one important way we could help save the environment is by densifying the hell out of our cities. And don't get me started on fears of gentrification - although there we're beginning to blur the line between "progressives" and leftists, but those lines are already pretty blurred.
I know enough left-NIMBYs to know that their intentions are pure - it's not a case of ladder-kickers. Just a particularly bad strain of thought that's - like you said - pretty widespread in municipal politics. Probably because NIMBYism transcends ideology in a way - there's different kinds of NIMBYism across the spectrum, always with the same outcome, and many voters will happily cross party lines to keep their neighbourhood just the way it is, thank you very much.
Happily, in my experience younger urbanists - even the left-wing ones - tend to (though don't always) recognize the excesses of left-NIMBYism.