Over the past few decades there has been a period of re-urbanization and migration from rural to urban areas due to changes in the job market. For instance, Was

Over the past few decades there has been a period of re-urbanization and migration from rural to urban areas due to changes in the job market. For instance, Washington DC had 802,000 residents in 1950. Later the population dropped to 572,000 residents in 2000. The population has now increased to 705,000. However, over the last 70 years, living standards have changed and some dwellings have either been demolished or made illegal (e.g. in 1950 it’s likely many people lived in Single Room Occupancy boarding houses more like a college dorm, or crowded into what we’d now consider slums, or so on) As a result there’s a mismatch in supply and demand, and Econ 101 is occurring: price of housing goes up until the supply and demand curves match. Solving inequality isn’t needed to solve this problem, any more than inequality was solved in 1950 when more people were living in poverty than today. We need to make more housing available and fix the supply/demand imbalance. When there aren’t enough units available, it’s impossible to solve the problem and allow everyone to live where they want. Even if everyone had the same salary or rents were arbitrarily fixed at a low rate, then the system of distribution would just change to something else, e.g. a ticket lottery.