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> If landlords are free to set rent to whatever they like, it's easy to see how that could lead to all sorts of terrible situations.

No, it's not. I'm not a landlord, but the logic is pretty simple: if the market rate is $1k/mo and I charge twice that, nobody will sign a lease and I make $0. If I charge $1,250 I might very well get someone. Why should I be forced to rent for $1k or $1,050 or something just because last year the person happened to be paying me $1,000/mo?

There should be plenty of notice if a landlord intends to raise the rent on an existing tenant (I don't think even 6 months is onerous on the landlord), but if I want to double rent that should be my prerogative.

To be clear, doubling someone's rent to $2k because they're a minority so they leave then renting to someone else for $1,100 who isn't a minority is a specific thing[0], and it is and should be illegal (in the US). I'm not talking about that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> if the market rate is $1k/mo

(I'm ignoring racial and otherwise illegal practices in this post, which are also a serious problem. Redlining and related issues are huge problems that need to be addressed if we want to have healthy cities.)

The problems (gentrification) start when the market rate is actually something like $2k/mo or even higher due to popularity and limited space.

It would probably be fine if that rate was due to simple inflation, as the ability to afford rents at these higher rates would have similarly increased. This could even be an acceptable local effect if local wages kept up with local cost of living.

However, in popular big cities, wages have not kept up, so if rents are allowed to rise to the market rate everywhere in the city, the entire poorer end of the population - who are necessary for any city to function properly - tend to end up displaced.

In theory this could probably be addressed by proper zoning. Allowing some high-end expensive housing is fine; it just needs to be balanced with an appropriate[1] amount zoning for lower-income housing. I fear this could be another area that is easily abused for both social class or racial purposes, but that's probably a problem regardless.

Other areas have addressed these problems with very strong rent control laws.

As cities grow and the population become more dense, these issues will become more common. The answer obviously isn't a pure free market, though I doubt we have invented the best way to regulate these problems. Maybe someone here can direct some innovation to the topic of local government and finding a better way to guarantee the wide variety of people that are needed to run a city are actually able to live in that same city.

[1] I have no idea what amount is "appropriate".

You make several good points, thank you. I don't mean my post above to be interpreted as "who cares about the poors," which it probably could be.

Wages are certainly going to be an issue. As a consumer who lives in a below-average COL area, I won't pay more for (to use a somewhat contrived example) a software product simply because its developers happen to live in SF or NYC, just the same as I'm not going to make the argument that someone in Belarus should be forced to charge me less for development services (though they usually will of their own accord). I think that plus the fact that real estate is very limited in NYC and especially SF means there is definitely an uneven pressure on rents v. wages, even for high skilled, in-demand professionals like software developers. Based on COL alone I'd need an 84.56% raise (according to BankRate) to maintain my standard of living in San Francisco, which isn't even taking into account the higher Federal tax bracket or the 4x higher state income taxes. The math just isn't there, and I imagine it's much the same if slightly less extreme for other metros like NYC, DC, and Chicago.

Isn't this just part of the fact that it's more expensive to live in a city? If you're a waiter or a bartender, you are better off living in a rural of small metro area than NYC or DC. How many people are waiters or bartenders in big cities that aren't doing it for a little extra money or while they're in school?

To your zoning point that's probably the only solution, but that's conceding the point that this is a problem which I'm not prepared to do. What happens to someone who has a $2500/mo mortgage on a property and is told they now cannot charge more than $1800/mo rent because they were rezoned? You're right, I don't think there is a regulatory framework in place to handle this fairly.

Zoning areas as low-income housing is almost certainly guaranteed to concentrate all the poor people in one economically depressed zone while all the wealthy people end up elsewhere. Where this has happened in the past it has led to the collapse of the poor area. See Detroit as an example.

> I suppose there's a big difference between intentionally driving people out to replace them, and it being an unintentional side effect of all sorts of stuff that's going on. It was my impression that the problems with gentrification are generally of the second type, but your comment makes it sound like this is being done intentionally.

In some neighborhoods, it truly is a campaign to drive out the existing residents ("orchestrated a campaign of 'polite harassment' / "bought out tenants apartments from their landlords")

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/04/nei...

I remember an article about redlining in Rotterdam, but this was in the nineties.