Urban doomsday mechanism created during the 1970s by well-meaning idiots who induced governments to restrict available development lands in order to maintain or enhance the quality of urban life. The immediate effect of this was to artificially inflate land values. Land development companies then ratcheted land values further upward by selling properties to themselves at inflated values and interest rates in order to avoid taxes, thus invoking a volatile financial version of the Chinese Fire Drill in which crazed developers and their bankers alternately chase each other to catch nonexistent assets as they float upward and dodge plummeting properties when their true utility and value become momentarily visible.