...and that's the economy working, where you can be run out of the city because a rich person wants your house?

No, that's NIMBYist government regulation preventing the economy from working by building high density housing in a city that needs it.

YIMBY pro-developer stances like Weiner's SB-50 aren’t going to help working class families and individuals either. I am very pro-development but we need high allocations of affordable and social housing to make the development work for the existing community.

Yes?

Supply and demand is basically the fundamental law of economics.

No, it’s not. It’s the foundation of market economies, which are not the only way to distribute goods and services. There are many alternatives to this.

Like Venezuela, Cuba, and the Soviet Union? Those alternatives aren't better.

Look at singapore for an alternative that isn’t associated with anti-socialized scare tactics. Soviets had a lot of issues but lack of housing wasn’t one of them. Same for cuba, although the sanctions have crippled the economy to make quality housing difficult. I can’t speak for venezuela housing as i have not researched it, and it seems weird to clump a country with a mostly private economy in with self-proclaimed communist countries.

A somewhat ironic example given the subject at hand

https://www.propertyguru.com.sg/property-management-news/201...

"House prices in Singapore are considered “seriously unaffordable”, with a median multiple of 4.6, which means that the median house price is 4.6 times the city-state’s median household income, according to an annual survey."

I was referring to the public housing, not the market housing. If you’re a citizen it’s not terribly difficult to get your own unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

This is how you preserve existing communities--it should be harder to move into a city than to stay there.

Why should existing folks be given preferential access to urban job markets? No one born outside a city chose to be born there.

Because without community, what value do job markets have? Life is more than working until you die. Only the rich have the luxury of something more the way cities are headed. This is worth fighting for. If you don’t start with values, you have nothing.

Anyway it’s somewhat of a moot point because you can preserve communities and still build—just not with market-driven rents and landlord-owned cities. And not everyone can have what they want and live where they want. It’s worth it.