So I left and went somewhere that had a better CoL/wage ratio. That's life.
The preferred solution is to not let things get out of hand in the first place.
[1] There are other options like stopping having these things provided publicly but few people would advocate that.
The economics of the property market are weird.
I think that if there more areas like this outside of the major cities, this wouldn't be so much of an issue. Fortunately, it seems like (at least in the U.S.) there is a movement to create more city-like suburbs, but this takes time.
The real issue though is that it's not "cities" in the generic that provide all these great things that many people want (while also being relatively safe and having a good choice of employers). It's a relative handful of cities--mostly coastal in the US. There's plenty of affordable housing in Detroit and New Orleans.
The numbers tend to bear this out. From what I've seen, there isn't a particular urbanization trend among young people. What there is is somewhat of a migration of college educated young people to a handful of particularly dense cities.
NOLA is on a coast.
So I agree with you, this talk of cities is misleading. The real issue is that the supply of the kind of places that people want to live in doesn't meet demand, and that these things are extremely inelastic in the short-run (it usually takes years to build up these kinds of neighborhoods).
Gentrification does happen incrementally. Look at Shoreditch in London. But it does take time and has at least some negative effects in spite of being mostly desirable.
Yes, chief among them jobs with living wages.
Some people have lived their entire lives in cities, paid into the taxes and helped build businesses, infrastructure, and the like, only to be kicked out due to lack of regulations in the housing market and the flood gates opening and driving prices through the roof.
I suspect you haven't experienced it given your flippant response.
Swing and a miss. You must be wealthy or not live in an area where the cost of living is out of control and people have to leave their home towns and other things behind to survive.
Nobody said anything about exclusive rights or anything remotely like that.
People who contribute that much, but have nothing to show for it? Those businesses they built can't have been very successful..
Maybe other factors are at work here. I hear foreign nationals like buying real estate to hedge against their home countries' political and economic stability. But that wouldn't be capitalism either. It would be foreign policy affecting Britain and the US for a change, instead of the other way around.
Would it be an open market if we only removed one regulation, height restrictions? Nope. But to blame capitalism when other major forces are at play is not a full assessment of the situation.
The problem in reality is that politicians are out of touch with capitalism. The solution is not rent control or land value tax. That only treats the symptoms. You cannot fix a structural problem this way.
The real solution is to make other cities more attractive instead of forcing everyone to move into a handful of cities only to get kicked out 20 years later.
I suppose, though I would have worded it "Grow up".