I go to a fair number of these meetings in my neighborhood and the NIMBY view I hear most often is "why do we need to turn Cambridge into another New York?" A lot of old people just seem to feel that their neighborhood shouldn't need to accommodate the new people who want to live there. The problem (in my view) is that we have been adding jobs like crazy so it's become a need to add housing to begin to catch up.

Interestingly, Cambridge, Boston and the urban areas around here actually had higher population in the past ('60s), but they packed way more people into smaller housing. A lot of the reason we need more housing now is because of smaller households wanting more space per person.