Housing costs tend to go up with economic development.
I had a discussion about this with a Portuguese guy once: you have the lazy communist bastard who wants everything to stay the same, and you have the smart entrepreneur who makes lots of € selling overpriced coffee to the pale hordes from the North.
It's a Red Queen's race, though. Because the housing costs go up, the standard of living remains the same.
The end result is a less moral society, because people have to change to stranger and stranger business just to keep their place in the hierarchy.
Instead of having a normal ('communist') job, you have to get involved in dirty tourism stuff. The end result of this is as in New York City or San Fransisco, where anyone with a 'normal' job has obviously had rent go up way more than income. Granted, they too could go into tech or finance, but the benefits to society of this are most unclear.
I had a discussion about this with a Portuguese guy once: you have the lazy communist bastard who wants everything to stay the same, and you have the smart entrepreneur who makes lots of € selling overpriced coffee to the pale hordes from the North.