> "isnt it counter intuitive to want a 'nicer' place for cheap?"

Not "cheap", but not $4M. 500k? $1M? Whatever price you paid when you bought in?

> "people of PA pay property tax"

The issue I have is that they don't - not really. If they paid property tax on their house's market value then I'd actually have a lot less of an issue with it. They want to set local policy and they're willing to pay the market rate tax on it, fine. As it stands most are paying next to nothing compared to their new neighbors.

> "one day, they'd work here and pick up and move to nyc or austin or utah the next year."

Because terrible housing policy is making it impossible to set down roots here. I'd like to stay.

> "the new tech crowd did nothing to build PA. it is rich of people who own no property, havent set roots, havent raised their families and built infrastructure to demand that those who have been doing that for decades pay more taxes."

Again, because the housing costs prevent us from buying in and the refusal to build new housing keeps the price astronomically high. Also the 'new tech crowd' has been here for decades at this point and does represent a large part of the community.

> "if they pay more taxes, dont you think it will be passed down as higher rent making the whole area more and more unaffordable?"

If they have to pay the insane tax they're forcing on everyone else, then maybe they'd be a little less resistant to increasing housing supply.

> "why does anyone think they can walk into the obviously most desirable zipcode and deserve to own a home there when people who have been living there for decades are asked to pay more to accomodate the newbies? sounds like colonisation/gentrification. if it happens in oakland, people wouldn back off. because it's palo alto, the residents are villains?"

People in Palo Alto have a black lives matter signs outside of their house while at the same time leverage local control to block any new supply and prevent anyone who isn't super rich from buying in. When they themselves have benefited from insane monetary return on their own property, could never have bought in today, and pay relatively nothing compared to their new neighbors in financial support for their own community.

They basically won the housing lottery (where the zoning laws were explicitly racially skewed historically).

The residents are villains because they've skewed the entire thing in their own favor. They've gotten massive returns on their house value, they prevent new housing to keep prices high for other people, they pay relatively no property tax on that value. The entire economy has been built from people starting companies that have driven that value for them and the people that have done that have to pay rent to the people that just happened to be here.

Also in Oakland it's the opposite, people that have lived there are getting priced out of their own community. In Palo Alto it's people that live there keeping prices high to price new people out. Both issues are solved by building more housing.

It's the hypocrisy that gets to me, I'd rather the people just said "we don't care about anyone else, but ourselves and the people already here - we don't want anyone else to join unless they're extremely rich and we have skewed all local policy in our favor to guarantee that outcome" and stop with the self-righteous political nonsense.