> They demand the preservation of architecture at all costs.
I assume this is a reference to the Wellington Spatial Plan and efforts by Wellington land owners to prevent old homes being converted into apartments or larger dwellings.
I agree this is a very harmful position for them to take. It's people acting in concert to drive up their land value. Whether this somehow ties into the Left-NIMBY Canon argued above though, I'm not sure. Are the land owners progressive lefties? Do they even live there?
> They demand the preservation of a single decades-old tree over housing.
This is a reference to the Macrocarpa tree in Avondale. What you fail to add is that this listed tree (i.e. with legal protections) on public land is blocking the development of 1 out of 6 large adjacent apartment buildings. Are people blocking the development of the other 5? No. Could the developer have planned their development to accommodate the listed tree, but choose not to? Yes. And this is an urban area with some of the lowest greenspace covereage in the city, with a long history of under-investment.
Meanwhile, the right leaning inner suburbs effectively implemented a town belt through leveraging power during the development of the Auckland unitary plan. If densification is being objected to in left-leaning areas, it's partly because right-leaning areas already ensured that they wouldn't have to at all! Case in point: Kelmarna Ave in Herne bay is getting a small supermarket because the community, via applying soft influence, made the planned development of apartments at the location politically infeasible.
Oh, and did I mention successive right-wing city councillors of the 80s and 90s running infrastructure into the ground so that good urban development was just that much harder for everyone?
> They demand more deference be given to traditional tribespeople over and above the progression of cities and housing the homeless.
Well, the extremely very obvious context here is contention over stolen land in sensitive areas. If you're talking about Ihuamatoa - "deference" was only granted after a long occupation of the land by extremely dedicated group of individuals. Of course, we wouldn't need to develop culturally significant land in remote parts of our city if we could intensify the places where prodominantly white, wealthy residents lived, without outcries from the politically powerful!