Modern-day Luddites, the lot of them. Holding up or attacking buses with employees on their way to work is an easy target. Not to mention the protestors mental

Modern-day Luddites, the lot of them. Holding up or attacking buses with employees on their way to work is an easy target. Not to mention the protestors mental acrobatics to somehow blame the passengers of the bus for the rising housing prices. That's very shortsighted and flimsy justification fodder for some extreme political activists to start riots. At no point will violence and vandalism be a valid argument in this discussion. The fact that the different spokespersons seemed to go out of their way to not condemn this act, is telling of their expectations from their members. They're willing to place themselves above the law or at least are willing to try and look the other way if their supporters commit crimes, but at the same time they want sympathy and understanding for their dire situation? Good luck with that. It's an economic reality that if a property attracts higher value through development (eg richer people moving in to a part of town), that its surroundings will rise in value as well. Shops and services targeting this new demographic will start to show up, catering to their (often different) needs, which have new needs of their own etc, ... This will affect everything from the pavement, the cars in the street, the small shops, the traffic lights, to the big brand supermarkets. It's usually a welcome sign that an area is improving. Yet from the protester perspective, they see the housing prices starting to outgrow their incomes and see themselves being forced out by their landlords to make room for richer people who can afford the rent. They don't want the area to develop further, they want to keep it at a status quo to stop the housing price from rising further. Does that make is less of a tragedy? No, leaving one's house because one can't afford it anymore is a heartbreaking decision, but it's a decision that a houseowner should make sometimes. You can't keep something just because you think you deserve to have it. We aren't living in an utopia and we must adapt to changes in our environments, whether that is getting an extra job or moving elsewhere, or trying to get more housing developed to satisfy demand and stop the prices from skyrocketing. Why not protest the government? IMO the protesters had a cause, but this violent act has done them much more harm than good. Protesting is a right, but when your words aren't heard, you don't get to throw stones at buses and expect to get a free pass. People will judge a group by its most prominent and vocal members. Grammatical dissection of whether or not the spokespersons are in fact not condemning the act doesn't really help their case, it rather defuses their argument and makes them look juvenile and opportunistic in the process, exactly what those who want them out, want them to be. Great success.