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I don't know Canada well enough yet, but I can tell you what life used to be like in the UK in my mum's time as a kid, around 55 years back in the North East of
by branchless 10y ago
I don't know Canada well enough yet, but I can tell you what life used to be like in the UK in my mum's time as a kid, around 55 years back in the North East of England. All families lived near each other and you lived near your school. You'd walk home past your nan's house and stop in there or at your uncles. Maybe when you got home your mum was out at the shops - ok go to your nan's a few yards away. Or just go to your neighbour, she knows you and should your mum be delayed long will feed you.
Then people decided that housing was an asset, an investment. The people that decided this were in finance, they made the credit available which sets the price. Access to local housing was limited. You had to go and get the best paying job you could just to compete in the "market". This meant moving away.
There were other reasons too like the destruction of local industry (forced out in part as land prices rose making them uncompetitive vs countries without efficient rent extraction). Plus brain drain into rentier activity in the capital. But for me land prices are at the heart of destroying communities.
I don't see community returning until we expel the usurers from the temple. Why is living on a piece of land so damn expensive? We don't have time for each other any more as we work insane hours. Both husband and wife have to work, leaving no time for other work in the community like stopping in to see a neighbour. All these tasks that were unpaid are now "on the clock" and the banks get a cut via renting money via debt creation for land.
My mum didn't have loads of libraries or "urban design" somehow coaxing people to interact. What that street did have is that they were not living in a time where ever single person was giving a big wedge of their wages to the banks thereby forcing them all to work all the time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- losteric 10y agoWe live in a society heavily oriented around consumption and under increasing pressure from technology... the market mindset has consumed the world. It's debatable whether wandering shrinking families are a symptom or a cause.
- branchless 10y agoYou can avoid consumption. You can't avoid the need to sleep relatively near to your work.
- nojvek 10y agoI sometimes do worry about that. If banks didn't create mortgages, would houses be more affordable. It's obscene that I will give half of my life's income to the bank to pay off my mortgage.
- sauronlord 10y agoYou don't have to give half your life's income to pay off the mortgage. Use your tenants money to pay off your mortgage. ducks out of the way
- slededit 10y agoPeople need places to live, so absolutely there would still be houses. Perhaps not as many of the more expensive housing stock with hardwood floors and granite counter tops. The evidence of this is the very strong inverse correlation between interest rates and housing prices.
- dazc 10y agoA lot of what you say resonates with my experience but... 'Then people decided that housing was an asset, an investment. The people that decided this were in finance...' I can remember when the obsession with house prices began and I'm not sure those in finance were entirely to blame for this? I live in Spain at the moment and it's interesting how people seem to be much happier, partly because they are not (in general) obsessed with the monetary value of their homes.
- branchless 10y agoCredit is the driver. You might be obsessed with jet planes - you can't get a loan for one. And it's not essential.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoPeople were living in squalor up to and right after the second world war. I might not like the rentier economy but I try and remember some of the alternatives are worse.
- branchless 10y agoRentier economy is actually only possible after productivity gains. You go back to after WWII and try and take a big wedge of their wages. They'd string you up. Only when the wolves are from the door can one siphon off wages through obfuscated means.