[ktothemc]

No, but seriously, cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function. Ever-rising land and housing costs keep accelerating beyond their marginal wages and compensation.

We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being.

Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.

[danielweber]

> cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function

It's not really "low-wage" if their rents are being subsidized, randomly.