I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually

I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually looks more like: Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there. Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region. So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm). The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.