What in the world is this?<p>"Informal settlement" suggests someone's trying to hack the system, that is the social / legal / administrative system for real estate, as in physical land and buildings. But I don't quite understand the purpose, motivation, and mechanics of the hack.<p>Are these enterprising individuals that built houses on a vacant parcel they don't actually own, hoping the real owners would stay away for 20 years or however long they need to establish squatters' rights? It seems like an incredibly gutsy gamble with an awful risk/reward profile. Surely if you have the resources to build that many buildings, it would certainly be within your means to simply buy the vacant land outright, you know, <i>before</i> you built a single structure, and then maybe build 2/3 as many houses in case your bankroll was stressed by buying the land?<p>Or maybe they do own the land, but are hoping the local zoning board is more likely to grant forgiveness than permission? So they build houses where they aren't supposed to be built, and hope to get away with it since no one will want to tear them down once they've been constructed?<p>Maybe it's some kind of tax scam where they don't tell the government the land's been improved and hope to pay property tax on empty land while collecting rent from all the houses? But surely tax assessors will drive by at some point and notice that, y'know, there are buildings there now which sure doesn't match what's in the records? And whoever built them will be in hot water for lying about the tax status of an entire housing development, and owe not just back taxes but fines, fees, interest, and maybe even theoretically be liable for criminal tax fraud? Or maybe they plan to sell the houses and get out of Dodge, the inaccurate documentation's the buyer's problem, the contractor's long gone by the time the authoirities catches up with them? But then wouldn't the sale go amiss when some buyer, y'know, <i>reads the deed for the property they're spending tens of thousands of dollars on</i> and notice it doesn't accurately describe the structures on the land?<p>It's not exactly out in the countryside, it seems like it's right in an existing suburban area. So it doesn't look like they're even trying to keep it secret from people at street level. Explain again, why do they need satellites and AI image analysis to find this?