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by rlanday 2843 days ago
You can't fit more people into the same amount of housing by raising everyone's pay. Either someone needs to start living with more roommates, or someone needs to get priced out and decide to leave.
1 comments

If pay was more equal, at least opportunities to stay in your local area would be more equal. I don’t think it’s the price as an absolute that makes people angry, it’s the feeling of being unable to compete for a beloved space.
Things might be slightly better then, but if there's still X number of housing units, you're still only going to have Y number of people living there.

Giving people a more even chance at winning musical chairs is nice, but how about just making more chairs?

This is partially at least an emotional problem which you cannot only tackle with logic. The other problem that you’ll currently see is that even if you can convince people that tearing down their house and building a new one in the same spot, they’ll often still want to be able to afford one of the new flats - and that’s currently not a given. So people understandably prefer to stick what they have.

So a fundamental ability to compete is IMHO a basic requirement for building more chairs.