Snakes and Ladders in the Housing Market

The Daily Mail reports that half of Manhattan’s luxury apartments are going begging as commie oligarchs realize the world is changing and not in their direction. In Vancouver, house prices have dropped 16% as taxes on foreign ownership skyrocketed. As in all the mega-cities, low-income housing is at a critical shortage and no one knows how to fix it. Hence, in the richest city in the world, Los Angeles, there are a hundred thousand homeless, most mad or driven so, by the imbalance our moral superiors have decreed is AOK with them. Libertarian seems to be the only meeting point between right and left, and that’s not working out. You cannot let the global market decide when it’s rigged. All those high-end apartments are being bought by men and women who are dragging their money out of Russians who are serfs for yet another set of oppressors, broken Chinese working in slave conditions and near dead Africans whose aid has been shunted off into the oligarchical heavens of Zurich and Manhattan and Vancouver. In B.C. we are a place for ‘safe money’, in case the Chinese or Russians or Nigerians or Ugandans decide to rise up and murder their oppressors, so they buy a $5 or $50 million dollar house, stash a student cousin in it to hold down their palatial bolt hole.

The rich are a new kind of nasty bunch these days, and because they all have “foundations”, we are supposed to worship them. More on commodifying the poor, when I can stand to think about it.