> It's pretty easy to turn that around and say that people with cash can displace and kick around anyone they want. I don't think you have less right to live there, I just think it shouldn't be money that is determinate. For instance, you could apply for placement that is need-blind.
The bottom line is that there aren't enough homes for everyone who wants to live there, so it comes down to how we allocate what there is. "Auction it to the highest bidder" has its issues but has a lot to recommend it: it's transparent, understandable, nondiscriminatory in a lot of respects, gives people a way to care more or less strongly, and means we get a market price for homes in that area that tells us where we should be building more homes.
We could use something like a lottery but that would mean a) houses would go to some random set of people who wanted to live in NYC, not the people for whom it makes the biggest difference b) we create a bunch of incentives for corruption - both the lottery itself and then people doing sublets/fake family transfers/... if they find someone who wants the place more than they do. Of course it's possible to fight that kind of corruption and for some things the principle is important enough to be worth it, but it's better if we can design the system so that it naturally doesn't happen c) we wouldn't be incentivising developers to build the homes that people most want.
(All that said I do think there should be a land/property value tax, to ensure that people only buy expensive land/buildings if they're going to actually use them, and to compensate the rest of the country who's priced out)
> This does preference people that already live there, but that seems elementary that the economic system should not have an inherent tendency to split up communities.
I did not fit in the "community" of the town I grew up in, and was very unhappy there. The city I moved to has been a lot better for me. So I feel quite strongly that everyone should get a fair chance at that, regardless of where they happened to be born.
> People should be able to move when they want to, not when they are forced to. The reason everyone wants to move to NYC is for economic reasons. Maybe if more places weren't destitute, fewer people would need to move around as much.
True as far as it goes, and I'm all for e.g. building much denser (NYC-like) neighbourhoods in other cities to help them gain the same advantages. But in the meantime we still have the question of who gets to live in the city that a lot of people want to live in.