Seems like an easy enough solution, though in an environment of plunging rents developers very quickly seem to put projects on hold and shift gears to other sor

Seems like an easy enough solution, though in an environment of plunging rents developers very quickly seem to put projects on hold and shift gears to other sorts of things. I've witnessed this first hand in my city whenever there's bumps in the road (eg. global financial crisis, recent introduction of various foreign buyer/speculation taxes). This should intrinsically make sense. Private developers don't have to build and there's other ways for them to invest their money. Now if the developer was a public entity with a mandate that they had to build now that would be different.