It also encourages well-connected people.

And massive corporations who are extremely profit driven.

I was born in a very small town in California. They didn't want to become just another highway stop for shopping. They wanted to keep their small town flavor/community/charm.

So of course they made TONS of rules and roadblocks to stop "The wrong people" from building there.

It's now a highway stop with a bestbuy and the like....because it turns out that the massive corporate chains can pay people to sit there and jump through your hoops, but the smaller well meaning community developer will just say fuck it and move.

> will just say fuck it and move.

Nothing wrong with that

People are free to choose what suits them best

By the principle of charity I sympathize with this, but this doesn't hold up without evidence. For example, what are the penalties for lying/grifting in this area? Does this all vary with the degree of corruption in the particular state/city/town? Or is it all corrupted to varying degrees nationwide?

Historically the penalties for grifting these programs are nothing in the vast majority of cases, if it's even discovered. The problem is a bunch of frontloaded vetting that is never followed up on.

So these forms and processes can be essentially spammed and nobody gets any real fine or other legal penalty, even when flagrant criminality is found? It seems like there would be major incentive for press outlets to expose this as government waste or capitalist greed, so I would be curious to see any existing journalism about this.