It is my experience that renters in my cohort (SF yuppie) are very much pro urban development. It’s the homeowners who are the biggest NIMBYs. They want their home values to increase and rent to go up. Reduced housing stock is a benefit to them; it’s not a benefit to renters.
Also: no amount of “thinking long term” will convince a renter to vote for their own eviction in order to make housing (maybe) cheaper for someone else many years down the line. It makes no sense. That is absolutely the wrong way to frame the problem.
There is a path where we expand rent control and incentivize housing development. They are not inherently contradictory policies.