Big city redevelopments often divide opinion. But few have done so in such a fierce and symbolic way – or been watched as closely by other communities grappling with housing shortages and gentrification – as the plans put forward by one London council to rejuvenate some of the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

The north London borough of Haringey’s is planning to form a joint venture company with an international property developer, and commit tens of millions of pounds’ worth of its land and buildings – including a housing estate close to Tottenham Hotspur football club, and its own civic centre – to a massive transformation programme. This has opened a new frontier in the already fraught debate about the capital’s regeneration, and sharpened divisions in local Labour politics that mirror the wider struggles over what the party should stand for.

The council leadership’s case is blunt. Haringey has more than 9,000 households seeking council homes and more than 3,000 people in temporary accommodation, while even in the borough’s poorest areas would-be first-time buyers are faced with prices for two-bedroom flats of around £500,000. There is no point tinkering at the edges. Their radical solution envisages building more than 5,000 homes for sale or rent, 40% of them priced below market levels, plus a library, a school, a health centre and town centre offices and shops. The leadership says the plan would create 7,000 jobs and make money for the council too.

This fits with a 2014 election pledge to “find new and different ways to generate income”, to “promote economic growth” and provide “decent, affordable homes for all”. Yet the Labour politicians of Haringey council who have come up with the plan are the targets of venomous opposition – especially from their own party.

Why? At its heart lie basic conflicts about the role of private finance, the use of public land, the functions of local government and the principles that should guide the spatial development of urban areas all over the country. It has become a microcosm of a debate that rages across the country, drawing in beleaguered councils, property developers, social housing tenants, lower middle classes anxious to remain in gentrified neighbourhoods, and the growing army of homeless. And it is also about Jeremy Corbyn.

The origins of the plan lie back in 2015, but ructions began in earnest in February. Council leader Claire Kober and her cabinet announced the council’s intention to go into business with multinational property developer Lendlease to transform the borough on “an unprecedented scale”. The idea was to form a joint-venture company for that purpose called the Haringey Development Vehicle.

This would be half owned by the developer and half by the council. Lendlease would provide things local authorities no longer have: lots of money and construction expertise. Haringey would provide the stuff developers can’t get enough of: precious, priceless land. Kober and supportive colleagues argued that improving lives in the poor parts of Haringey, notably Tottenham where the 2011 riots began, and Wood Green, required huge physical changes that only the HDV could provide.

The balloon went up. All over London, Labour memberships had swollen with the advent of Corbyn as leader. Meanwhile, a populist narrative, simplistic yet seductive, had taken root in the public mind: ordinary Londoners were being “pushed out” by “rich foreign investors” wanting “luxury flats”. This has often focused on the “regeneration” of council-owned housing estates, their demolition held to facilitate a more general “displacement” of the poor. The term “social cleansing”, shockingly emotive, has become common currency, including among the liberal intelligentsia that forms the bedrock of Labour’s membership surge. Haringey Labour moderates mirthlessly claim that the most strident militants are some of the most middle class – owners of valuable homes in gentrified Crouch End and Muswell Hill.

Resistance to demolition, with its concomitant complaints about privatisation and global capital flows, has obvious attractions for a protest politician like Corbyn. He was a councillor in Haringey until 1983. The HDV was bound to excite the ire of his followers there, along with others with whom they have made common cause: Green and Socialist Workers party activists, anarchists and Liberal Democrats, who form the council chamber opposition.

Even local Labour MPs David Lammy and Catherine West have publicly urged the council to hold off. Yet in one sense the consternation is incongruous. As Kober often underlines, the HDV retains a 50% council stake in the land and the properties built on it, avoiding straight sell-offs. Variations on this approach are being practiced by Transport for London with similar aims.

The Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle in 2013. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

But Lendlease’s involvement raises the stakes. Southwark council partnered with the firm to knock down the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, held by some to be a mistreated gem of postwar municipal provision but by others as a “sink” blot, best expunged. The financial crisis intervened, promises were broken and the small number of social rented homes to be resupplied on the Heygate site has sealed its status as a cause celebre.

Haringey intends to initially transfer a former care home, council offices and the library in Wood Green, various commercial properties and the civic centre where the decision to form the joint venture was formalised – plus the 1,300-dwelling Northumberland Park estate off Tottenham High Road. Later on, the Broadwater Farm estate, forever scarred by association with the 1985 riot, could be included.

The council’s business case says the HDV could last for 20 years and that “Tottenham alone is capable of delivering 10,000 new homes and 5,000 new jobs by 2025” as Haringey emerges as “London’s next big growth opportunity”. Transformative indeed.

None of this persuades the Stop HDV campaign. Spokesman Phil Rose, a former chair of Haringey Momentum, thinks it is unlikely to help the worst off. He says Lendlease is getting the best of the deal and is sceptical about the council’s promise that estate residents will be able to exercise a “right to return” to a new home on the same terms. He takes particular exception to what he sees as the HDV’s implications for democracy: “The 50:50 takes away the right of veto. You can’t have a council run by a private company.”

Kober disputes this: “It doesn’t take away a veto. It’s about retaining control, not ceding it.” Rose would have preferred the council to form a wholly owned housing company as others have, enabling it to borrow more cash than it is allowed to as a local authority but without any private sector tie-in. This view is shared by Patrick Berryman, one of a sizable minority of Labour councillors who are unhappy with the HDV. For him, the priority should be homes for traditional social rent, not the mix of various kinds of “affordable” and market-priced homes the HDV envisages. And he wouldn’t knock down Northumberland Park. “If we have land as a Labour council, our job is to provide an alternative to private rent for people who need it,” he says.

But Kober is adamant that bigger thinking is needed and that Haringey residents, including those on estates, agree. “I talked to hundreds of people over the summer and I hardly heard a word against the HDV. Mostly, they want to know how soon it will start. In a borough like this, where so many children and families don’t even have a secure place to live, you have two options: you can go for an ambitious solution that will make a real difference or you can decide that ideological purity matters more. As a Labour politician, I know which I think is right.”

How much ice that cuts with local members, boosted by a mix of eager youth and middle-aged returners with memories of 1980s local government struggles, remains to be seen. Ward branches are soon to start selecting candidates for May. All across the borough, Momentum-backed slates have taken command of them, along with both of Haringey’s constituency parties. The same thing has happened in other parts of London, but those tides have yet to see waves of sitting councillors being de-selected. Haringey could be different.

As for the HDV itself, that is still rolling forward. A judicial review of it was heard at the high court last week but, whatever the outcome, unpicking it would be no small undertaking at this stage, even if Kober and her allies were deposed. Would that be the most productive use of council time? One current member, resigned to de-selection, fears the worst: “None of the hard left are even thinking about how to get more homes built. They will just allow the situation to get worse while they wait for a Corbyn government that might never arrive. That will be their legacy to Haringey.”