Yeah, I probably don’t mean fraud in the narrow criminal sense.
The thing that feels fraud-ish to me is that the loss doesn’t just disappear because nobody books it. A huge amount of capital and useful urban land is tied up preserving a fictional valuation and someone is paying for that somewhere.
Maybe it’s not a clean “X stole from Y” thing here, but it still means real businesses are displaced, worse downtowns, and less of the city that could have existed otherwise. I haven't seen this sort of thing as much in Australian cities where I'm from, but have a lot in the US where I live.
So maybe a better way phrasing "fraud on the public commons" is closer to what I mean. Everyone involved is probably acting rationally inside the system. The public still gets stuck living inside the dead space created by the fiction created by it and ends up eating that cost.
Who is being defrauded?
Who even is the fraudster? The operator of the building is losing money, so clearly they're not making a gain from anyone
Yeah, I probably don’t mean fraud in the narrow criminal sense.
The thing that feels fraud-ish to me is that the loss doesn’t just disappear because nobody books it. A huge amount of capital and useful urban land is tied up preserving a fictional valuation and someone is paying for that somewhere.
Maybe it’s not a clean “X stole from Y” thing here, but it still means real businesses are displaced, worse downtowns, and less of the city that could have existed otherwise. I haven't seen this sort of thing as much in Australian cities where I'm from, but have a lot in the US where I live.
So maybe a better way phrasing "fraud on the public commons" is closer to what I mean. Everyone involved is probably acting rationally inside the system. The public still gets stuck living inside the dead space created by the fiction created by it and ends up eating that cost.
Yes, but seems unlikely to be prosecuted... The government directly benefits from higher tax valuation.