I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and then when it gets down to the gritty job of building new stuff, it's all "we don't like it, because it's not what currently exists!" No surprise that the really big development tends to happen on old industrial lands where there's not enough people around to really complain.

But of course, you can see how the incentives run. If somebody likes their neighbourhood the way it is, and doesn't want change, then if they don't complain about new developments to councillors and planners, they gain nothing. But if they do complain, then there's a chance they can get developments stopped. (Thanks, "community-based planning".) So the cost of complaining is quite small, but the rewards can be quite large.