Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but I do disagree with the premise: market forces should not always have the dominant hand, if only because it will alwa

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but I do disagree with the premise: market forces should not always have the dominant hand, if only because it will always be the dominant hand. A more fluid balance can and should be established. Sometimes the market needs should prevail, but I would argue that the balance we have today is far too imbalanced. Your example is a good one of the extreme of that position; I think SF is the canonical example of what can happen if you do a poor job of prioritizing which parts of the local culture you're going to preserve, and market forces act on the rest. That points to one of things that I think the market is pretty ok at: pricing goods by demand. However, creating new supply to fill that demand in an unrestrained way would see many of the things I imagine SF residents love about the city like its extensive parklands fall to new development. I do think a happy medium can be struck a lot of the time. In Austin we certainly have voices that want nothing to change, which are countered by voices who think the market is an all-powerful god who will lead us to the promised land of perfect pricing. But most of us fall into the middle. We like a few historical homes to be preserved, a neighborhood or two with a few extra zoning restrictions about how and what you can build that affects the character of the neighborhood, and looser restrictions in most other places. (We also have an advantage in that we're not surrounded on 3 sides by water, so its relatively easy to increase supply at the tradeoff of a commute.) But what we're not doing a good job of right now is working to ensure that those getting the wrong end of the gentrification stick aren't economically depressed and primarily communities of color. I think there's a lot of things that can soften that but right now the city is mostly paying lip service to the idea, and that has to change. Doing so would move us a lot closer to what I think is more of a balanced game between market forces and non-market-based values.