• The only solution to homelessness is……

    How the mega mega-wealthy in LA and San Francisco put up with the plague on the streets is beyond me. The cruelty in their hearts must be as impressive as their bank accounts. Up here in the demented Dominion, we just buy the homeless hotels and serve them 24/7. So far, the province has bought three hotels, and is in the process of planning for another 40 rooms. The cost is nasty, but Malcom Gladwell in an extensive New Yorker essay a few years ago, estimated the lifetime cost of caring for someone on the streets as just over $1,000,000.

    If you don’t do anything, they’ll cost you a hundred grand a year. If you do something, give them an apartment and a caseworker, they’ll cost you $25,000 year.

    Gladwell, NPR, February 2006

  • 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.

    You cannot let the global market decide when it’s rigged.

    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.