>Rent? The town does rent control. There is nothing to rent. You can't outprice the locals with their queue time.
IMHO, this is one of the biggest issues holding back EU labor mobility in places with strongly regulated rent controls. You're an EU citizen and wanna move somewhere else for a job but you get fucked on the housing market because the locals have privileges you don't have, so either employers need to take a hit and compresate foreign workers more for the trouble, or they don't and so you either get fucked if you choose to move to work there, or you don't bother moving at all because it's a shit deal so the employers are starved of labor and go bust. And that's besides the legal, linguistic and cultural hurdles you have when moving to a new country where you don't know the system and don't speak the language.
The EU fixed a similar issue like this when universities gave special privileges and conditions to local students but not to students coming from other EU countries who were being charged money for things the locals got for free, so the EU forced them to have to give the same benefits and treatments the local students were getting to all EU students coming to study there, ending this discrimination.
IMHO, the same needs to be done on the housing side if we wish to have actual labor mobility that improves the block's economic potential, and not just one that's on paper and holds back economic development by wanting to screw foreign workers of more money to prop up the local housing bubble.
If a skilled EU citizen moving to another EU country for work, the new host country is already getting a huge break for getting a new taxpayer paying into the welfare system out of the box for free, without having invested 20+ into their education like it did for the locals, so then why double dip and also screw them over with unfavorable housing rules that only serve to enrich landlords?