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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

That seems like such an easy thing to fix, though. The land a listed building is sitting on should be zoned only for the listed building. If it burns down, it gets rebuilt exactly, or donated to the public. Allowing developers to benefit from such "accidents" is the problem.

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or the site is cleared and goes into a 50 year ‘public use’ lockup, where the developer owns it still, but it must be used for the public good for 50 years. A park or community garden, for example. Basically just enough to make it unattractive as an option for the contractor

Start doing things like this, you just might shake enough of the BS money out of the real estate markets to return to sanity.

You propose to make the real estate markets work better by further restricting supply?

Are you advocating for increasing supply through arson?

Restricting illegal profit-taking, where possible.

Black money inflates markets. Inflated markets inflate other markets.

That worked well in the Bay Area. Definitely a bastion of sane real estate markets.

Govt leadership is in bed with developers and would never enact such restrictions. But you can dream about how liberal processes could lead to rules you like better and try the well worn strategy of voting and waiting.

This, at least sometimes, happens: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-68...

Largely because it was reported so widely and was obvious what had happened.

Where I live a listed church mysteriously burnt down the night after planning permission to turn it into a hotel was declined.

Oddly it's just sat there as a burnt out husk for the last 15 years, rather than the developer forcing the issue.

This opens up forms of other abuse.

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