Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city.
It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro cities.
When it comes to 100% affordable housing, yes the Hillary voters are on their own, but those are like 1-2 headline causing projects. For every affordable housing project there are 10 market rate housing projects that never even see the light of day.
Several of the activist actually worked for this developer.
Real leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers. They are against for-profit, private equity, land banking speculators, and yeah nimby homeowners. In general we hated the Oak Park type nimby liberal more than we hated the right to be honest.
They certainly are in my neighborhood.
https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/48-hills-cost-of-growt...
The “private developer risk” the article derides is an enforceable approval timeline that lets private developers have bounded risk. Apparently that’s a bridge too far.
Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.
I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit.
Fair enough, but that's a somewhat non-standard definition.
I'm not even very far left and I identify with the term because party leadership are all 80yo and out of touch.
Voters feel ripped off by the establishment. Running on "we're the establishment and we're here to help" is a loser, and letting Trump be the rebel is malpractice.
Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary (New Oxford American Dictionary):
> leftist, noun: a person who has left-wing political views or supports left-wing policies.
> left-wing, noun: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and economic equality, and typically favors socially liberal ideas; the liberal or progressive group or section
Anti-capitalist thought represents a subset, but is certainly not the sole marker of left-wing political thought.
Now, my _personal_ take on this is that western left-wing thinking and liberalism (in the moral philosophical sense) are deeply intertwined (given the Enlightenment and its values), but anti-capitalist thought is deeply illiberal in nature. It is this fundamental contradiction that leads to permanent infighting within the left-wing spectrum.
I think I'm injecting what I know from getting a degree in political science and a two and half subsequent decades of experience paying attention to how political terminology is used by scholarly, journalistic, popular, and activist sources across the political spectrum into the definition.
> Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary
And that's a tolerably decent definition for a relatively compact general dictionary, but it misses a lot of nuance; outside of activist sources using it as a slur for their opponents, it is not used in nearly the local-politics-relevant way that left/right (especially qualified with a national label, like "American left") is.
T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it and why it's so powerful. Their basic project is to strip environmental and labor protections by tying them to euclidean zoning and saying "it's all the same."
And by the way, they may get their way (Newsom is already forcing repeals of environmental protections in California while toasting Klein) but at the end of the day euclidean zoning will still be around, because it is supported by people who are way too powerful.
Another by the way: I remember fighting the big Chicago rezoning in 2004. They had us chasing our tails by trying to double the parking requirements and letting us fight to get them back down to where they were in the old code, feeling like we won a big victory.