I guess I would sacrifice the look of my city so that normal middle class people like teachers, policemen, firemen, artists, and minorities could live beside myself and fellow engineers and doctors.

The whole "we need to preserve the architecture of my city" is a first world problem. What comes before that is the ability for the middle and lower class to survive in the city. Cities are living dynamic entities and should be capable of change.

It's also unclear that building more luxury housing (because that is what will be built, there as here) stabilizes rental prices for everyone else.

I can see why it's tempting to think about it as a supply and demand problem. But be realistic about the motivations of developers, too.

And it's not like "affordable housing" requirements work, either, when those are defined relative to average income.

Luxury housing becomes more affordable with time. There are plenty of buildings in New York that were targeted upscale at the time they were built, but are no longer upscale and thus rent to people lower down the income spectrum now versus then.

Fellow New Yorker here. Thanks to all of that construction, rents here have actually decreased over the past year: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre...

That's why we're all "build baby build": Increase supply enough to meet demand and you can get prices to drop. It's worth it in order to help maintain the existence of affordable housing.