This all relates to the fundamental problem with housing in most cities, in that the extreme regulation destroys all competition. This actually happens in almost every field nowadays - the proliferation of effectively Nanny state government "protecting" its citizens from making bad decisions by regulating standards into things like residential zoning or even things like crop production or materials processing dramatically reduces the ability for competition to ever enter the market, because the more regulation you burden the industry with the more impossible it is for an upstart to actually comply or even understand it all.

That goes hand in hand with how another poster above commented about how regulations are written to look like they are for the common good but are only good for those writing the laws. And when you exist in a system where money buys politicians and the will of the people has no effective influence on politics, you end up using regulation to stop competition.

I want to see one city who bucks the profiteering and greed and just dezones everything and just lets people build. Yes, you would need to be more responsible as someone moving there to know if the building is safe or not, but really you have always paid for that through taxes and increased home prices, so paying someone to appraise your potential properties or more likely having general agencies that organically do it would be so much more preferrable to just preventing any innovation in the space at all in the name of NIMBYisms and market capture.

There's an even more fundamental problem with housing in most cities: the fact that land in those cities is an inherently scarce resource and that people need homes to survive destroys competition and encourages speculation. When land owners can't sell new homes for rapidly increasing prices, they just sit on the land until they can.

Charge twice the price of what flats were a few years ago, advertise it in China first, and ignore the new owners leaving it empty. That's the worst case that's been seen in a few places.