Right to live where you work seems to be a good one. The problem with AirBNB isn't about too many people living in an area like SF, it's about local population being displaced in favor of richer, temporary visitors.

It's certainly a nice thing to be able to travel and visit other cultures and countries. But the advent of massive international transportation combined with few tourism hotspots has created a tourism industry that can outprice locals, and thus destroy the cultures that created the artefacts they show to tourists.

   Right to live where you work seems to be a good one.

The people who work in the center (often government, large companies) are usually also the most well-off, so living close to work is to a good approximation what you'd get with market prices.

   temporary visitors.

Temporary visitors typically visit the center which is where most of the cultural landmarks as well as the party-infrastructure is located.

If we generalise the "live where you work" to "stay where you spend most of your time, then it makes a lot of sense for the visitors to be housed in the centre. Otherwise you force a large amount of commuting on them. For course that doesn't matter much for each individual visitor because they are around only for a short time, but that's not the right metric. It means that Berlin's infrastructure is heavily taxed with all that unnecessary commuting by (every changing) visitors.

> If we generalise the "live where you work" to "stay where you spend most of your time, then it makes a lot of sense for the visitors to be housed in the centre.

The thing is, it completely reverses the meaning of my point, which was based on concern priority, not transportation efficiency. To me, it seems important that people whose home, job and lifestyle/culture is at stake are treated preferably to people for whom the city is just a tmporary leisure.

By making sure that visitors don't effect too much locals, we also promote a kind of tourism which promotes hospitality, and which ensures that the object of visits is not destroyed by tourism consumption.

International captial cities like Berlin are major destinations for travellers of all stripe, and will be for the forseeable future.

Indeed, the boundary between tourists and residents is porous. Capital cities attract a transient population from week end visitors to interns or workers who stay a few weeks, to summer visitors who stay a season, to students who stay for a few years, to proper residents who stay a decade or more. All of them are a source of ideas as well as a source of income for Berlin's industry. "Das ist auch gut so." Hence Berlin needs to cater for all. That includes providing substantial, centrally located living space (whether hotels or apartments) for short-term visitors.

A queue is the usual solution. That makes it pretty much "right to live where you were born" since that is when you add yourself to the back of the queue.

It's not a very efficient solution (no one can move to the city for a job since you need somewhere to live within months then - not decades). It also needs very draconian rules to avoid a large black market in contracts.

There are no good solutions to this problem. If you are a socialist you argue that the lesser evil is inefficient queueing and if you are an economic liberal you argue that allocating via market prices is better and gentrification/segregation is the lesser evil.

Right to live where you are born would be possible - it is neither better nor worse than the current mechanism, just different. But the question remains if there's a way to change market rate, so more people can pay it. Berlin seems to be trying that by banning things which aren't desirable from their perspective.

> Right to live where you are born? That adversely affects anyone not born in a central district.

Thinking about it, this reminds me of the question of immigration. People usually say that one shouldn't be allowed to immigrate wherever he wants and/or that politicans are beholden to the people of their country, not the whole world. So .. what's the difference between a city and a country here? Why should the city council not put the wishes of those born there first?

>People usually say that one shouldn't be allowed to immigrate wherever he wants

That is a very weak position, do you actually believe things can be true because "People usually say that"? Either immigration between countries is wrong in some way that generalizes to immigration between cities, or you can't use the fact that immigration is by default illegal to support your position.

Not allowing unrestricted immigration between countries is usually a pragmatic consideration, that is related to how countries usually spend their money vs. how they earn their money. Social expenditure, for instance, is usually planned based on the amount of tax the state gets from an average citizen, importing a lot of people who will pay less in taxes means you either have to degrade the quality of service for everyone, or start discriminating between people when spending on them (which betrays the concept of welfare spending as a 'safety net' - it's supposed to serve people who can't earn enough to provide for themselves or their family). Sometimes anti-immigration sentiment is motivated by nationalism or racism, even to the extent that people aren't allowed to live where they were born, and it would be a shame to reproduce those ideas on a city level.

Random allotment (essentially first come first serve) is a lot more fair than allotment by power of money. If it's not about being fair to people, then why are you even here.