You’ve got it backwards. The newcomers will come - if rich people want to move somewhere, they’ll easily outbid any poor people currently living somewhere when

You’ve got it backwards. The newcomers will come - if rich people want to move somewhere, they’ll easily outbid any poor people currently living somewhere when it comes to finding a place to rent. The existing population will be displaced if you do nothing. The options are: 1) rent control, plus a lottery or waiting list to determine who gets to live there. This is similar to what they did in sweden, where they have nine year waiting lists. That would be catastrophic for the growth of the city, so it might not happen. 2) allow the market to build new housing, so the rich newcomers will have somewhere to go that doesn’t require displacing existing residents Of course, if you don’t care about locals being displaced, you don’t have to do either of these, you can make apartments illegal and watch land rents go up and do nothing about it. That’s the choice SF voters have made, up to you whether you think it makes sense