If people value living in an area, the price goes up until supply and demand are similar. Those with less to spend have many other options. Nobody is owed a specific home. To say otherwise would ignore the huge benefit of immigration.
> Those with less to spend have many other options.
That's where you are very much making bad assumptions, or showing your complete lack of experience
I know a single mom with a kid who needs a regular scheduled experimental treatment only available in one hospital in the province. She can move to a lower cost area, where there aren't many jobs, and none that would pay enough for her to regularly travel to the city and get a hotel. She can't find a cheaper place to live in the city, because even a shared place is going for $1k+ for a bedroom, and no one wants a shared place with a kid. She could move farther away from the city and commute, but the rent savings wouldn't cover the cost of public transit, let alone a reliable car. The line for affordable housing is years long. She is one of thousands with a story like that.
There are a million and one scenarios where 'other options' just don't exist. To suggest that people opt to be unhoused/live in a car/couchsurf even though they have the option to be housed is wild.
Nobody is owed a specific home, but it is cruel, inhuman and immoral to suggest that people aren't entitled to a shelter of some sort, especially in a country where we have more than enough resources to solve the problem.
This is very hard to give the benefit of the doubt - nobody has implied "just be homeless". You're calling an imaginary enemy "cruel, inhuman and immoral", but you're addressing a real person.
They said there were other options. They said they shouldn’t live in a region if they get priced out of it.
What are the other options? “You can’t live in this city, regardless of reason, unless you have enough money” is cruel and inhuman in the real circumstance I described.
It may be that they don’t have the experience or knowledge to realize that things are the way they are, but “you aren’t entitled to live anywhere near where you need to live to keep your child alive” is the reality of their position.
But this doesn’t offer any justification for why, for locations that people highly value living in, we as a society ought to do anything other than maximize the number of people living there.
Sure, but it is an option (as well as everywhere along the spectrum up to maximization), and so ‘people want to move there’ is not on its own a justification for ‘prices must go up’.
