There was a major environmentalist and neighborhood preservationist movement in California during the 1960s and 1970s that helped fuel anti-growth measures. Wh

There was a major environmentalist and neighborhood preservationist movement in California during the 1960s and 1970s that helped fuel anti-growth measures. While they weren't strictly leftist (there are right-wing slow- and anti-growth advocates), they did complement the views of the New Left, which embraced environmentalism and came out of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. The San Francisco freeway revolts of 1959 and 1964 were early examples of this (https://www.cahighways.org/maps-sf-fwy.html https://www.cahighways.org/maps-sf-fwy.html). Consider folk songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970) from Joni Mitchell with the famous lyrics "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Such sentiments resonated among many Californians and was especially popular along the coast. These sentiments helped lead to anti-growth measures taking effect throughout the state, especially in the coastal areas. For example, San Jose during the 1950s and 1960s undergone a campaign of dramatic expansion throughout Santa Clara Valley, even reaching Coyote Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann), but this growth was curtailed in the 1970s and San Jose has not expanded beyond its boundaries. Santa Cruz also took on an anti-growth attitude in the 1970s. While not all anti-growth sentiment is left-wing (there are some right-leaning areas of California, particularly in the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, that also have slow-growth or no-growth policies for maintaining "quality of life" and "rural character"), much of the anti-growth sentiment along the coast traditionally had an environmentalist and grassroots community preservationist flavor to it, with opposition to "developers" who threaten it.