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I don't understand why these people don't want to let developers just make money? It's not like developers are even particularly bourgeoisie, hedge fund types and associated financial wizards are able to make bank much more freely in California.
Soft skills aren't my strong suit, but I spent far too much time gargling rage-slop from Facebook until I turned off the spigot, and the upshot of all of that is that I'm confident that there's a very straightforward model on the vague-left, as follows.
Everything is some kind of class conflict, in that there are rich people exploiting working people in some way. In order to solve a problem, you need to figure out who the rich exploiters are, and, depending on how brave and/or edgy you want to be, regulate/tax or eat/behead them.
In this case, possibly due to the influence of the evil developer trope, developers are evil business owners who want to bulldoze virtuous, affordable working-class homes and replace them with empty glass high-rises. Because developers are evil, it's never considered that the existing homes were once newly built by some other developer. Because developers cannot do good, it's never considered that people will live in these new buildings, so there's a persistent idea that developers intentionally construct buildings, intending that they stay empty, and profit from this by "writing it off" or something like that.
Example here: "No matter how many houses you build, if they are not affordable, then you will not solve the housing crisis."; "we need to take on the profiteers and the corporate giants to win homes for people." (This is an organization which is, as far as I can tell, not keen on letting developers build homes because they're "profiteers" and "corporate giants" and, presumably, the homes they build are somehow not "for people".)
Left-NIMBYism is, from what I can tell, frequently the result of getting negatively polarized against YIMBYs, who are, unfortunately, kinda smug nerds sometimes. For example, YIMBY poster Sam Deutsch made fun of comedian Kate Willett for being a gentrifier complaining about gentrification, and she is still, four years later, writing red-string-on-a-board articles like this and constantly tweeting about how YIMBYs are funded by "billionaires".
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