When planners and pundits complain about the high social costs of regulations restricting housing supply, a common response is: "Even if regulation does make [city X] more expensive, no one has a right to live there. Why can’t they all live in Detroit or rural South Dakota or some other cheap place?"

If by "right" one means "legal right," this is correct. Although the Supreme Court has held that there is a constitutional right to move to a new state or city, the federal courts have not interpreted this doctrine as a restriction on land use regulation. And because many judges bought their houses or condos decades ago when housing was much less expensive, they are unlikely to overturn rules that raise housing costs.

But if one means "moral right," then the question should be phrased differently. Because people who make the "no one has a right to live…" argument usually do so in defense of government regulation, the real question is: do the current residents of a city have the moral right to use the coercive power of government regulation to exclude supply, raise rents, and thus exclude a) new residents and b) residents who haven't already bought a house and are forced out by rising rents and prices (including most children of existing residents)? 

Two leading 20th century political philosophers, libertarian Robert Nozick and progressive John Rawls, have written books that might be relevant to this discussion. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick wrote that individuals have a pre-political right to life, liberty, and property. According to this view, tax regulations are a kind of slavery: they take the fruits of one's labor without compensation. Accordingly, government may protect its citizens from other takings such as force, fraud, or theft, but nothing else.  

Under Nozick's theory, an owner of land would have the right to build anything he wants on such land.* Thus, land use regulations designed to limit new housing violate natural rights—not the right of the would-be tenant to live in such housing, but the right of the landowner to build it.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defines justice as "fairness"—what, in his view, would be agreed to by persons who would be acting behind a "veil of ignorance" preventing them from knowing whether they would be rich or poor, wise or ignorant. Applying this principle, he argues that unequal outcomes are just only if they improve the economic well-being of the worst-off group.   

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