You're not actually talking about the problem I asked about - what you're describing is Gentrification, where, for example, the bohemian culture of Northwest Portland is priced out of the market and flees to Hawthorne. The problem I'm trying to look at is the problem that San Francisco and the Bay Area have, where the housing supply is so far below the housing demand that people are building houses 75 miles away, and people are moving to them because that's the closest that they can afford to live. An off-the-cuff answer to that is 'great, remove the zoning and land-use limitations that are preventing more construction,' but that immediately leads to the question 'why will anyone ever build a new structure that is priced at less than half a million dollars a unit in the resulting construction boom?'

I'd like a good answer to the second question. I don't actually mind that Gentrification happens - even though it can suck to be the long term tenant who has to move because their income hasn't kept up with the value of the property that they're renting, I'd rather have that than have the hollowing out of the tax base that happens if you don't let that happen, and I'd rather have the dynamism of a neighborhood that comes from having new tenants move in over the years as different economic endeavors make sense and as the tenants move through the financial stages of their lives. I don't think casting neighborhoods in amber is actually any better than casting people in amber.