Jeeze there are some cold-hearted people in here.
You can both respect property rights and acknowledge that it's super shitty that working poor (often from historically marginalized minority groups including LGBTQ communities) are being forced from the urban core of cities as property values rise. Very regularly from historical poor areas that have become important cultural hubs for different groups with deep roots and a sense of pride in their communities. Often the very groups that made areas desirable to live in are no longer able to afford rents in those areas. This also obviously affects creative communities and artists as well who are often part of making areas or cities more desirable in the first place as well.
It's especially disingenuous to scream "PROPERTY RIGHTS" and ignore historical subjugation of some of the people involved as though centuries of both social and government policies didn't push certain groups into lower socio-economic status. Like, google redlining/blockbusting and then look at gentrification, it's not as simple as "property rights" when you understand that property rights have never been equally available to all people and still are not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.955d5a97c10c
Like, these situations are complicated. Lots of poor people of color couldn't GET loans because of bank and government policies. And so they wound up having to rent from landlords who are now the ones reaping the upside of property rights.
This is a complicated issue with complicated answers. Defend our Hoodz is obviously not the answer, but I totally get where their frustration comes from.
Cities nationwide need to tackle affordable housing in serious ways. And they need to police who is getting access to affordable housing. Students (and GRAD STUDENTS) should not qualify as low-income because they are presently not working if they are being supported by grants or family.
Look, lots of anti-gentrification people wind up looking a lot like NIMBYs. They don't want their neighborhoods to change, and they certainly don't want working-class Hispanic neighborhoods to turn into fine dining hubs. I get that, but that's not reasonable. Wanting to be able to continue to afford to live in the same area you and your family have lived in for generations? That seems like something we can tackle
We need more density (and change to get there), requiring a certain % of new units to be low-income, tying a certain % of low-income units to those displaces recently and giving bonuses for retaining locally-owned or historic neighborhood business in new developments. A more robust public transit infrastructure is a big help to poorer people in increasingly more expensive cities as well. There are solutions to this, and unless we want Austin to be 99% upper-middle class tech bros in 20 years these are problems that need to be tackled now.