"I have a right to live here" is to me a less bizarre claim than "I have a right to impose a height limit on the neighborhood I live in" or "I have a right to tie up housing stock and keep it empty at the cost of disrupting other people's lives."

Honestly "I have a right to impose a height limit on the neighborhood I live in" is the closest to reasonable IMO. The citizens of a place should be able to shape the place they live in.

Would you be okay if it was allowed to vote that someone you don't like can't live in the neighborhood? By imposing height restrictions, you end up doing just that.

It's more interesting to me how many people think money should, and inevitably will, trump all other interests.

Maybe if you're a 20-something programmer uprooting your entire life to live somewhere else after decades in a location because financial pressures outside your control make your home and everywhere near it impossible to afford that's not such a big deal.

But for fuck's sake, think about this for a second. Most people do have things rooting them to a particular location. Maybe it's a social circle. Maybe it's support network. Maybe it's their career, or their children's schooling, or their health and the local climate.

At the end of the day we as a populace get to decide public policy. Taking people being priced out of their homes as fait accompli because them's the market breaks is heartless enough, but then saying disdainful things about just how painful and difficult it is is worse.

Here is the thing, there is only so much room for people. You are either saying "fuck you" to the young people of the community that want to get a house in the place they have roots, or you say "fuck you" to the people that can't afford to live there. I don't see how it's particularly fair for a person to feel entitled to an area they did not purchase property in over another that just didn't happen to be there as long.

> At the end of the day we as a populace get to decide public policy.

That's how we got to the NIMBY polices we have in many major metro areas and that has contributed in a major way to the financial pressures.

It's always interesting to me how people go to municipal government meetings and continually suggest that, on the one hand, jobs should be plentiful, while on the other hand, housing should be scarce.

If you have X jobs in city B and Y housing units, where X > Y, you have a tight housing market. If X >>> Y, then people can't even just double-up with roommates anymore.

I'm perfectly willing to talk about the moral trade-off involved in asserting that the born-and-bred residents of a city have a right to residence which they can assert over newcomers, to keep transplants out, but first we have to get the economic deadweight loss of insufficient housing supply off the damn table.

Build baby, build.

The eternal NIMBY conundrum. It'd be saner to bite the bullet and accept that they don't really want the jobs either; they just want the revenue, which means the _productivity_, which could be accomplished with the (relative) wages for _existing_ jobs.

They want to be rich without having rich-people problems (like too many new people moving to your hometown). I have a friend who works in city planning, and disturbingly enough, he told me the gentrification episode of South Park ("The City Part of Town") was completely realistic.