Not really equating care in some obscure singular form to goodness. Rather pointing out that care can take many forms, much of which Nimbyism can and quite often does represent. It's certainly a key reason why the Annex isn't bisected with expressways, and why it has a healthy mix of apartment towers interspersed among lowrise brick homes. Obviously a small midrise isn't comparable to urban expwys or blockbusting, and again not saying Atwood is right. But at the end of the day it was Nimbys in some form via an assymetrical public sphere that made the area great.
Interestingly I'm trying to see through a false dichotomy: that we have avg developer-loving ppl with open arms making up a unified majority, and awful regressive anti-urban Nimbys at the far other end. There's obviously a huge in-between, crossover, and sound logic and both ends. Not to mention that this dichotomy doesn't actually exist.
On a basic level though I just like hearing about this instance because it has a renowned creative type bypassing their dayjob to speak candidly about a hyper-specific TO/urbanism issue. It's easy to obtain a vague-to-the-point-of-uselessness Richard Florida-type quote about how super awesome density is someplace else, not so much the other way around.
