Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.

The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.

Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.

People are focusing on the house in the middle, but if you look at he whole picture, it isn’t that one house. It’s every single house on both streets. It’s not just this specific owner. If this were the US, I’d suspect a HOA at work.