I mean if our zoning wasn’t so overly strict, those real estate holders could cash in on enormous rent prices by transforming that commercial space into apartments.

Then there would be more housing supply, rents would go down, homelessness would improve, and those real estate holders would be able to get back to making profit, and there’d be less lying about the pros and cons of working from home.

All of it could be better, through the mechanism of consensual mutual profit that we call the free market. If only the government weren’t constantly enforcing largely arbitrary rules about how this block can house people but that block can only be for offices.

Keeping rendering plants away from preschools is fine. Arbitrarily telling people they can’t put beds and kitchens into a commercial space and let people live there is not.

There’s profit being lost AND people going homeless because there is a third party constantly preventing us from making the deals that mutually improve our lives.

And they’ve convinced you the real estate owners are the evil ones.