On the Pearl clutch, gas lighting and housing supply versus housing affordability. – Scout magazine

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Vancouver’s population drops for the first time in 45 years. I guess that doesn’t take into account the deaths from the heated dome or the deaths of people with no fixed address, not to mention the record number of opioid overdose deaths. So what does the article attribute the falling numbers to? Lack of housing supply. Isn’t wanting to pay 2m for something you could get half in Surrey a supply problem? It sounds more like an affordability issue. outraged“Vancouver has added more housing units per capita than any city in North America in the past 30 years, but housing prices have risen faster in Vancouver than in any other North American city” .

Even the Bank of Canada, an unelected body that sets monetary policy for the whole country and whose core interest is in keeping house prices from falling, blames lack of supply instead of lowering interest rates . No: Financialization of housing, artificially low interest rates, low property taxes, criminally low wages, bad zoning, zero land value captureunchecked speculation, no capital gains tax on primary residences, under-regulated short-term rentals, a corrupt self-regulating real estate industry long known for shadow toppling and exploiting loopholes in bare trust, REITs buying up rental stock, the erosion of social housing stock, the disappearance of co-ops, no vacancy controls, the fact that British Columbia is the eviction capital of Canada, or that in Vancouver and Toronto, up to 1 in 5 homeowners own more than one property, or the fact that the federal government has been downloading housing responsibilities from cash-strapped provinces since the 1990s. blame the lack of supply even though Canada has more 1.3 million vacant homes. I’ve said it before: all of this was easily predictable.

Pearl clutches on Twitter and Reddit are even blaming this mass exodus on rising crime. A problem: according to VPD datacrime is down – Crime continued to fall in Vancouver in 2021. Of course, as Justin McElroy points out, the data does not take into account localized experience, but that means there has been no change in the status quo. We still refuse to address the root causes of crime: the long slow march of neoliberal austerity policies that gut our institutions, decimate our social safety net, burden personal responsibility and weaken our communities.

You can see it in how we are handling the pandemic. We are gas lit by the authorities. Betrayed. And they are told to do more when they admit to doing as little as possible:

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Related:

You can see it in Bell Let’s Talkan insidious cancellation of the corporation tax of a company that benefits the suffering of prisoners. The only reason Bell is playing this role is because our governments have passed the torch to them, abandon the canadians.

You can see it in the way we treat our elders: Seniors in Vancouver’s Chinatown fight poverty and racism to put food on the table.

We cannot continue to rely on charity to cover up our government’s failures:

This type of neglect manifests itself in a deep resentment that can either lead to the strengthening of our communities through organizing and raising awareness, as in the examples above, or go radically in the opposite direction, as we see with the convoy of truckers (is fear and mistrust being used as a scam to further extremistseparatist program: $4 million in fundraising frozen by GoFundMe days after convoy of truckers left Vancouver. The hashtag #flutruxklan really says it all.

That $4 million could go a long way toward fixing our broken health care system. All you can do is laugh at “Karen Convoy”: Unvaccinated truckers call on Canadian government to change US government rules on unvaccinated truckers.

It’s the same with the Vancouver State Council, I guess. ICYMI: Prank caller goes to Bart Simpson at Vancouver City Council housing meeting.

Meanwhile, this reporter is all of us right now: