So many development battles in major cities around the world fall into easy narratives (villainy versus virtue, for instance) that we tend to imagine them all possessing moral fault lines that are clearly visible: a set of capitalist savages on one side, and on the other, the marginalized agents of a more noble civic mission. That scenario has proved vulnerable to inconsistency. This year, a group of neighbors inhabiting a patch of the Upper West Side just south of Columbia University began a campaign called Save Manhattan Valley.

From what did they hope to save it? In this instance, the enemy was not a future condominium tower with an in-house aromatherapist and windows the height of an Italian cypress. Instead, it was the city’s planned demolition of three parking garages it owns on West 108th Street, to make space for the construction of an 11-story building that would add 258 units of affordable and supportive housing for the poor and the elderly.

Fliers and petitions circulated. “There are no plans to replace the garages,” one document proclaimed. “800 more cars will be competing for street parking!” On the face of it, of course, the argument is absurd, if not enraging — pitting the interests of people who seek the most convenient transit to Fairway or Bucks County against those who do not have a decent place to live, and for whom a $345 monthly parking bill might be considered a luxury on the order of a cabin on the Queen Mary. “Earlier this week I got a letter from a woman who was the single caretaker of her grandchild,” Vicki L. Been, New York City’s housing commissioner, told me when I called to gauge her reaction. “She enters housing lotteries, and her number never comes up. She is worried about becoming homeless. I have to say to people like her, ‘I’m sorry. It’s more important for people to have parking’? I just don’t think that’s the kind of city we want to have.”

The opponents of the project leading this brigade, however, hardly conform to type. One of the founders of Save Manhattan Valley is a woman named Glory Ann Hussey Kerstein, who began squatting in an abandoned building on West 106th Street in the early 1980s with a group of Dominican immigrants. A tenant organizer in the Bronx who would go on to run three homeless shelters, Ms. Kerstein worked to get the city to turn the building over to its occupants; the apartments eventually became co-ops that would be owned by many of the same Dominican families who were residing in them illegally. Ms. Kerstein, who has long hair dyed vaguely the color of a slice of red-velvet cake, doesn’t own a car.