Commodity Housing
January 16, 2021I went to the barbers today. It was busy, with all the chairs full. In the chair next to mine was a man in his late 20s, I would guess, chatting to his hairdresser, about the same age. For the full twenty minutes, they discussed the house that the client was preparing to buy.
Not once did he ever mention the aesthetics of the building or the landscaping. Not once did he talk about what a great place it would be to raise his kids or to have fun with his friends. No, his entire conversation was about maximizing his potential profit over the next 3 to 5 years. That was it, that was all he had to talk about; that was all that concerned him.
My parents, over the course of 50 years or so, moved from a cold-water inner-city slum to a modest semi-detached in the suburbs, then to a large rural house, and finally downsized to a suburban cottage. I bet that in all those moves, the question of profit from the property was never thought of. Making sure you could afford the move was important, sure, but having a comfortable and right-sized home was all that really mattered.
That mind-set has clearly changed and, in my opinion, it is this commodification of housing — encouraged by the real estate developers and their sycophants at City Hall — that keeps us in the mess we are today.
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Posted by jakking
Opposition to Safeway Site Hardens
January 16, 2021The City of Vancouver Planning Department have been keen to put a tower on the Safeway site at Commercial & Broadway since the late 1980s, and community opposition to such a project has been fierce for the same length of time. For those interested in the history of the struggle over that site for the last decade can read the whole sorry business in these columns. It is also covered in detail in my book “Battleground: Grandview“.
The latest version of the developers’ pipedream is even worse than previous incarnations, rising 39 storeys above our human scale low- and mid-rise neighbourhood.
And it has attracted a great deal of neighbourhood criticism. This opposition has now begun to coalesce into an active group that has launched a website.
I urge you to read what they have to say, and to sign up to get involved and/or just to keep yourself informed on this development which will affect our wonderful neighbourhood for generations.
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Posted by jakking
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