Lawsuits Block Thousands of Seattle Homes, $39M for Affordable Housing

"We no longer have the luxury of giving our people a shadow subsidy by freezing their neighborhoods and cities in amber. Spiraling housing costs in any city with real economic opportunity, a floundering energy transition, and the inexorable migration of manufacturing to more development-friendly countries have become so severe that we must dispense with our collective illusion that America will always look like it looked in 1975. Slashing the thicket of red tape that prevent development, and subordinating local interests to the needs of the nation itself, are no longer idle dreams — they are immediate necessities. If we insist on continuing to be the Build-Nothing Country, our once-mighty middle class will sink into a genteel poverty, and someone else will build the future on the bones of our civilization."

And the top comment in this Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/11deckj/maybe_tr...

"Consider how much of our modelling is based on the assumption of voluntary transactions. We say that all have a right to life and liberty, but is that really true?

Every single space on planet Earth is owned by someone. In order to exist, one must occupy space. You can't exist outside the legal boundaries that those owners have every interest in upholding. As recently as a century ago, you could and two centuries ago it was actively encouraged. Any land you could occupy was yours to claim (risky as it may be).

But now... From the very moment of birth you must find a landlord who is willing to let you exist. If that landlord demands a lifetime of labor in exchange, what choice do you really have? If no landlord voluntarily chooses, despite incentives to the contrary, to charge much less, what are you but a slave? There isn't an easy solution, we all share this world and it is impossible to live truly independently...

But the solution is certainly not to demand a lifetime of toil at the whim of a handful of owning families in exchange for the right to exist. All the while creating profits that help them sustain their power over you."

As an alternative there’s things like the protected views framework [1] which in London has enshrined which vantage points can see St Paul’s leading to some of the odder skyline architecture like the Walkie Talkie building.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view

In a world with an ironic sense of justice the court would accept their argument and extend it to then requiring Escala's demolition so that their neighbours would not be affected by shadows.