Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and

Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous. I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.