Well come on, it's a little more complicated than that. Where you live is not just a simple commodity to you, it's your home. Having lived through the complete

Well come on, it's a little more complicated than that. Where you live is not just a simple commodity to you, it's your home. Having lived through the complete gentrification (Disneyfication) of Manhattan I found that, despite being of the Liberal bent, it was hard to see old neighborhoods disappear, look around at nice neighborhoods and realize a good percentage of the apartments are owned by people who are in them only a few days a year, and watch as the interesting fringe stuff (i.e. The Hat) was replaced by the interesting mega-expensive stuff (i.e. Per Se.) It feels bad to become an outcast in your own land, even though that kind of thing does not come into play in Liberal thought. I don't think that some people asking for some other solution than pure supply-and-demand is untoward. Understanding how they feel: that their home (meaning both the place they live in and their neighborhood) might be more important to them than most other things. There's a certain amount of suffering we cause them with our exercise of simple capitalism. While we can't measure pain in dollars and cents, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about it. Not everything should be measured in dollars and capitalism is not the only moral system, nor is it inevitable. I don't have answers (well, actually, I have plenty of opinions on answers but none that are radically different than any other answers already given) but I also don't think that the brou-ha-ha is useless: it's always useful to have these discussions. The end result of this kind of public pressure is often compromise.