Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FredPret 314 days ago
The real estate market got borked by the fact that municipal authorities answer to incumbent owners, who ~universally acted to limit new building. This breaks the mechanism by which some speculators go out of business.

If you can build anywhere, and a speculator is blocking development of a prime piece of land, you'll simply build elsewhere, making that land less prime with each passing moment, and eventually driving the speculator out of business.