(Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
And anyway, sometimes renting is cheaper than buying. It's not inherently bad and there are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to rent for decades at a time.
Individual on a fixed income that is too low to pay the cost of living in their home and must therefore move, because the fact that the local economy has improved (making things more expensive) doesn't imply their income improves to match it.
People agreed to rent, perhaps they had no other choice, perhaps they where forced by factors outside their control. But those things happen. When I was younger I had a dear friend move away because his parents got a better paying job somewhere else. It's the same sentiment, he had his roots there and still had to move (if for other reasons than not being able to pay rent).
The short of the story is that when entering into a contract you should switch to a mercenary mode, and get the best deal you could possibly make. Don't lay down roots if you don't own your house. Buy don't rent, etc.
ps, does anyone know the(an) average commute time for someone who is not able to afford a living place next to their employer in these areas?
Life was hard when we had to forage for food.
Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide.
Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio.
Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time.
And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;)
The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient.
The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
People adopted agriculture because the forests no longer had enough food. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles were no longer viable. So of course they wanted a more predictable food supply.
Long before this point in time, that wasn't a concern: the forests were full of food, so there was no reason to bother with agriculture. People invented agriculture out of necessity, like most inventions.
Where did I talk about "agricultural mass-starvation"? Agriculture is how people avoided starvation when the resources ran out. But it wasn't as nice as the "golden years" when the forests had plenty of food and there weren't many humans competing for it. But there was no way to go back to that time, just as there isn't now.
"Garden of Eden"