It is a problem because there is no middle class housing. It means that aspiring to be middle class no longer becomes possible. These laws and similar start with the assumption that the poor will always be poor and that no change is ever possible in someone’s life, that there’s only rich and poor.

When you install policies like this, you pull rungs from the ladder. If you’re goal is to alleviate poverty, the best way of doing so is by making people’s labor more valuable. By keeping a mass of people in place, you devalue their individual labor because there’s always someone who will take the lowball wage offer. If housing were let to be dictated by the market, the poor would face a choice: upskill to make their labor more valuable or move to an area where their labor/cost of living calculation is in their favor. Over their lives, this ends up bettering them and reduces poverty. By removing incentives to do so, you keep people poor.

I’ve seen this a lot. I lived in LA and my neighbors all had some form of rent subsidy. None of the kids had an education and worked low wage jobs. Some who moved away ended up owning homes in other cities and gained wealth through appreciation hence reducing the wealth gap. Their kids all went to college because there were not enough low skill jobs where they went. In the end, the people “pushed” out had better lives and were less precarious financially than those who stayed.

We shouldn’t care about places: all this talk about displacement, erasure and gentrification. We should care about people. A feel good solution that appears to be nice to the poor ends up hurting them long term. We should incentivize people to move to locations where they are able to make financial and educational investments in themselves since self sufficieny is the best way to guard against the dangers of poverty. Many people on Reddit want government action in all aspects of life. My answer to that is we had 2 years with Trump, Republican Congress and conservative Supreme Court. The only thing preventing them from destroying safety nets was Trumps incompetence. Some day there will be a Trump who isn’t incompetent and that person will end safety nets. The people dependent on government at that time will face a harsh reality since they won’t have experience in self sufficiency.