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As usual, context is everything. > They demand the preservation of architecture at all costs. I assume this is a reference to the Wellington Spatial Plan and
by polemic 6y ago
As usual, context is everything.
> 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!
- Falling3 6y agoThanks for providing all of that background information! I was skeptical of the parent comment's claims - particularly how overly simplistic they were. But as someone on the other side of the world, I can't easily know how unrealistic their portrayal of the situation is.
- mdoms 6y agoLike he says it's complicated and he most certainly has NOT provided "all" of the background. His portrayal is very very misleading but suffice to say this discussion has been hashed out a billion times on a billion platforms and I'm not willing to have the same boring discussion over again.
- Falling3 6y agoYou criticize his post for only include some of the background information, yet yours includes none of it. If you're willing to call out the former for being misleading, what of the latter?
- Robotbeat 6y agoI'm a YIMBY, so I think forcing developers to redo plans (and this has a non-trivial cost, much of it hidden and always downplayed by NIMBYs because the biggest cost is time) because of a tree that isn't very old is pretty terrible, and none of your explanations are persuasive. It sounds ridiculous to me an ocean away. But on your last point, I am much more inclined to agree. Indigenous people are not a mere tree, and dealing with the whole imperialism/colonialism(/genocide?) thing is an entirely different level of ethical consideration. I'm way more hesitant about anything impacting actual people or reinforcing past stealing of indigenous land than I am about nostalgia about some tree or building.