> As if they have some inalienable right to live in places like Brisbane.

So the folks who live there now do because they were born earlier and got to buy a house first?

> Either way it's for them to assess, not you.

Until the state decides to apply eminent domain so more people can better use the space available.

> As if they have some inalienable right to live in places like Brisbane.

As if anyone had an inalienable right not to have neighbors.

With attitudes like this, why wouldn't the existing owners feel their existing way of life is being threatened? Not everyone loves living in a high-density environment, and some people would tend to want their community and home to have the same properties that made it attractive to them in the first place. When you suddenly get an influx of new population that wants to change the character of a community and starts entertaining schemes of forcible land redistribution, how could one not assume that the locals are going to feel like they're being somewhat invaded?

I can see the grievances of both sides on this, but I honestly wish there was more focus on spreading out these 'tech hub' communities to places beyond just the Bay area. There's a certain absurdity to the idea that the tech industry of all industries has this need to clump everyone together into a hyper-concentrated beehive of activity that irrevocably alters the host communities upon which it descends.

> Not everyone loves living in a high-density environment

No one is suggesting that Brisbane should be paved and turned into Manhattan. People are asking Brisbane to approve development in some fallow fields. Brisbane residents (like many of the small towns in the Bay) benefit financially from office space, but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.

> but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.

And this is the key argument to be made here. Building stores and offices has a cost - the people who work on those offices and stores must be housed somewhere. A regional empty homes/unhoused inhabitant number could be used to guide a global rule for new developments. If you want to build offices at some place, you need to build k * offices houses at a nearby location.

I agree. When someone moves to a small town by choice there is nothing wrong with wanting it to remain similar as longs the majority of residents like it that way.

There are many new residents to San Francisco that also prefer living there over places like Manhattan precisely because they enjoy open spaces and non-overbearing buildings. Suppose these new tech employees finally convince housing changes and get some condo buildings put in place of the single residence structures. Fast forward 50 years and now the newest generation that wants to move to the city asks these condo building to be replaced with Tokyo style super dense micro-apartment buildings. Those condo owning old-timers might resist that, no?

And yes, I too fail to see the need for the centralized tech hubs that created this dynamic. Spread it out or build new hubs where land is cheap.

Flooding as quickly as possible into hyper-connected and rapidly changing beehives of activity ("cities") is one of thew few constants of the history of human civilization.

The absurdity is that we have such low need for agricultural labor, and such sophisticated technology for skyscrapers and subways, and still live so far from each other, in such small clusters. The absurdity is that there are still, in 2017, substantial numbers of humans that don't live in major cities.