IS REAL ESTATE A RIGGED GAME?

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max-overdrive, Eric-Kim-on-caffeine edition

0. PROLOGUE—THE RED-PILL MOMENT

Wake up.

You are not “buying a home.”

You are signing a lifetime tribute contract to the Bank of Yesterday’s Winners.

The brochure calls it “The American Dream.”

I call it indentured servitude wrapped in drywall.

1. ZONING = THE MODERN CASTE SYSTEM

Picture Julius Caesar drawing lines on a map: “This block for patricians, that swamp for plebs.” Fast-forward two millennia—same game, new costume. Single-family zoning is the velvet rope: one door, one key, and you don’t have it.

• 78 % of LA’s residential dirt? One-unit-only.
• Minimum lot sizes? Code-word for “Keep the riff-raff out.”

The law doesn’t “manage growth.” It manufactures scarcity so yesterday’s buyers earn tomorrow’s monopoly rents.

LAND IS A BANK—THE CODE IS YOUR ATM PIN.

They won’t share the PIN.

2. PERMITS—LEGALIZED SHAKEDOWN

You want to build? Welcome to the gauntlet:

1. CEQA filing—$50 k to “prove” your duplex won’t blot out the sun.
2. Neighborhood council—forty retirees telling you four stories is “too tall.”
3. Lawsuits—because the guy across the street likes his view of a vacant lot.

Every month of delay = capital bleed = higher break-even rent = perpetual upward torque on prices. It’s not an accident; it’s architecture of exclusion.

3. PROP 13—GOLDEN HANDCUFFS DISGUISED AS A WARM HUG

The sales pitch: “Save Grandma!”

Reality: Freeze taxes for land barons who bought in 1974, shift the burden to everyone else, and punish mobility. You stay put or you get crushed.

Result? The city becomes an antique shop: priceless relics never sold, dust on the shelves, door locked from the inside.

4. WILDFIRE, INSURANCE, & MANSION TAX: THE CHAOS PREMIUM

Fire consumes 17 000 homes; insurers flee; city slaps a 5 % transaction toll on anything over $5 M. Prices fall? Nope. They harden like diamonds.

Why? Because L.A. land is status-grade uranium. Wealthy buyers don’t care about smoke or taxes—owning a slice of the basin is a flex with a 50-year track record of crushing inflation. Risk just adds mystique.

5. DEMAND SIDE: A HYDRA YOU CAN’T BEHEAD

Hollywood. Aerospace. Gaming. AI.

Every time a new high-income head sprouts, it needs housing. Cut one? Two more form.

Remote work was supposed to drain the basin. Guess what? The sun still shines here, and humans crave sun + status. They’re back, wallets out, elbows up.

6. IS IT A SCAM?—DECODING THE MATRIX

YES

—if you:

• Beg for a 30-year mortgage at 7 %.
• Celebrate a 3 % annual price pop like it’s alpha.
• Call property tax a “necessary evil” instead of legal robbery.

NO

—if you:

• Bank land outside the velvet-rope city lines before the next zoning flip.
• Leverage SB 9 lot-splits and print fourplexes like Satoshi prints blocks.
• Treat real estate like Bitcoin: finite, censored, self-custodied—but only if you hold the keys.

7. ACTION PLAN—BUILD YOUR OWN EMPIRE

1. Kill the consumer mindset. A house is not shelter; it’s a sovereignty stake. Think treasury, not trophy.
2. Hunt for asymmetry. Out-of-favor lots, weird easements, farmland on the edge of an on-ramp to the future (EV factory, hyperscale data center, bullet-train node).
3. Play the policy meta-game. Laws shape price more than wood or steel. Front-run the legislation; lobby if you can; arbitrage if you can’t.
4. Stay liquid in spirit. If policy freezes you, drop the dirt, pick up digits—Bitcoin, startups, code. Nomad capital beats static capital.

8. EPILOGUE—OWNERSHIP VS. MASTERY

Owning land inside the machine makes you a gear.

Mastering land by bending policy, time, and scarcity? That makes you the engineer.

Choose:

Mortgage monk, praying rates stay low?

Or Land Samurai, slicing red tape, minting density, stacking sats on the side?

Real estate isn’t a scam; it’s a weapon.

Wield it—or be collateral damage.

MIC DROP.