by Sean Orr | We are Tennyson’s mariners, and we’ve eaten the lotus: Vancouver is fast becoming Fat Cat City as luxury purchase opportunities pile up. If you we don’t violently vomit blood-specked rage while you read this then there is something drastically wrong with you us. “It’s kind of a high-powered game of keeping up with the Joneses — except in this case it’s keeping up with the Fendis and the Armanis”. Barf! Real, actual wealth has never needed to prostitute itself so vulgarly. What we’re seeing here instead are expensive expressions of personal insecurity…
“The edgy neighbourhood [Gastown] may once have been Vancouver’s skid row…”, the masturbatory article continues. Wrong. Skid Row is skid row. Gastown has always been Gastown. It was gentrified in the 70s, not the 2010s. “Stylish, well-heeled Asians make up the majority of her business…” Oh, just stop it already.
Meanwhile, to our south, no one will heed this warning:
The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
Just one year ago, East Shellwood was one of the poorest neighborhoods in America. Its public schools were buckling under budget cuts and the crime rate was steadily increasing, while property values had hit an all-time low.
Today, all of that has changed. East Shellwood is thriving, and shows no signs of slowing down. So what happened?
It all started when a community-minded entrepreneur by the name of Jackson Klemmer had the innovative idea to replace every single one of the area’s longtime residents with affluent twentysomethings. The rest, as they say, is history.
“I knew if we could just find some way to increase the cost of living so that poorer residents had no choice but to move out, we could completely revitalize the neighborhood by filling it with predominantly white twentysomethings,” said Klemmer, a real estate investor and community activist. “People said East Shellwood was a lost cause. But I never stopped believing in this place and the people who could potentially live here once we got rid of all the poor people.”
Related: Ayn Rand’s Capitalist Paradise Is Now a Greedy Land-Grabbing Shitstorm.
Meanwhile the Conservatives keep getting more….conservative-y: Peter MacKay Wears Gun Shirt From Group That Wants To Repeal Canada’s Firearms Laws. But…but…Justin wants to give your kids weed! Or, I see your true colours. Oh, and this is the responsible gun-owning veteran who uses his disability to sneak vodka into football games.
Meanwhile environmentalists are zealots who want to shoot people on Skytrains: The Paver, the Optimist, the Suspicious, the Skeptic and the Back-to-the-Lander. “We don’t need to tell you the resource debate can be loud and antagonistic”, so we need to be louder and more antagonistic.
Don’t look at it like you’re losing a glacier, but rather that you’re gaining a cool new lake! Decker Glacier lake at Whistler a sign of melt to come. Not sure if it’s on purpose, but that headline reminds me of Refused.
Bandwagon alert: Gregor does ice bucket challenge. Not to criticize the challenge, but I’d rather see him do the Rubble bucket challenge. Or the clean drinking water challenge. Or the Grimes challenge.
Vision Vancouver, NPA, Greens are neck and neck in council race, poll shows. “But city hall got low marks for transparency, homelessness and poverty, and “engaging with regular people”. Who paid for this poll? Who are regular people?
The NPA’s wedge issue? They are against bike counters: Vancouver bike lanes boast record summer cycling traffic. Talk about missing LaPointe.
Regarding the Arbutus Corridor, Bangkok proves that railways and community gardens can coexist.
Craigslist of the day: Cozy, spacious three-bedroom suite near UBC, SFU, Trinity Western, U of A, Berkely, and McGill for rent.
at least we can rage together
I feel as though I need to scrub myself after reading that Province article, but I doubt the stain on my psyche will ever be removed.