Residents get preferential price treatment to visitors because they provide societal stability. It's the same reason why state residents get preferential tuition pricing to out of state residents.

You give discounted state tuition because you don't want a state full of low-skilled dummies. You give residents an edge over tourists so you don't have a shortage of people to put out fires, cook food and remove garbage.

It's not hard.

I think it absolutely is hard. Almost everything in life is more complex than most people think. Even in-state vs out-of-state tuition. Kids don't have control over where their parents choose to raise them. Why should Kid A have to pay twice as much to get the same education as Kid B just because Kid A happened to live 3 miles on the other side of the state border? That can make you feel trapped, like you're stuck in whatever little hellhole you were born in (especially if you have non-supportive parents). I can understand why a resident discount makes sense, but at the same time, sometimes I feel like it should be backwards -- give out-of-state residents the discount -- just to encourage new young adults to get out of what they've known their whole life as "normal", and see that things don't have to be like they are. Move the example just a little bit to kids from Brownsville, TX vs kids from Matamoros, Mexico (also < 3 miles away), and tell me that the issue isn't hard.

To not be purely depressing, I'll present an example of something I think is a step in the right direction: At least some universities are good about giving out scholarships to low-income students that offset the difference between in/out-of-state tuition.

not hard as in to grasp the concept of why it should be that way.

Because I weigh my need to have a home higher than someone else's desire to be a tourist. I don't want my entire life subjugated to international market forces. Shocking doctrine, I'm sure.

Permanent long-time residents are what make a city what it is more often than not. Added to that, residents are contributing long-term to the local economy and paying taxes to a degree that temporary visitors are not.

On top of that: yes, his city. It's the problem with places like Hawaii where the locals who have been there for generations get told they have to eat shit because rich haoles can afford to buy up or rent all the land. I feel it's way less fair not to give preferential treatment to long-time multi-generational residents, just because a bunch of tech nerd mercenaries have no concept of laying down roots somewhere.

Assuming you live in the US (SF?) The American story is a story of migrants, whether from other countries or within the nation itself. People move for opportunity (though this is decreasing as the costs have gone up dramatically in the last decade)

Nobody owns the city, the city is a result of the people who live there at any given time. Renters and tourists pay plenty of taxes too, and they aren't riding the real estate lottery wave due to permanent long-time residents fucking everyone else over with zoning rules that are making the prices go insane.

Because of taxes. OP likely has been paying taxes all his life, his parents likely paying taxes all their life, and so on... in a way, the city belongs more to the OP than not.

You don't think tourists pay a ton in taxes? I live in one of these cities and there are a ton of taxes that are geared towards tourists. In many way locals benefit with lower taxes because of all of the tourist income.

We’d have to look at numbers to argue this objectively, but I highly doubt that a tourist spending 1-2 weeks a year in a city will yield more revenue to the local government than a resident living there 365 days a year.

That's a strange comparison to make. I highly doubt that the resident yields more revenue over that 1-2 week period than the tourist, or that the resident yields more revenue over a year than a year's worth of tourists.