The Decline of Vancouver
via saeidfard.com
by Saeid Fard
Mar 14, 2015
Vancouver, once a city with its own unique spin on Canadian ideals and culture, is well on its way to becoming a vacation city for the world’s rich, its economy transforming into one predicated almost entirely on catering to their luxurious proclivities, and its citizens transformed into modern serfs permitted to live in smaller dwellings on the city’s periphery, if you’ll allow me to exaggerate for effect.
Hyperbole aside, consider this: the nature of serfdom was one where serfs, unable to acquire their own plot of productive land, worked and lived on the land of wealthy nobles whom they served. In Vancouver the average person who owns a detached home made more money from capital gains on their property, roughly $100,000 per year in the last decade or so, than the average Vancouverite made in income, roughly $65,000. At those rates, it’s effectively impossible for average people without seed capital to join in on the boons of the Vancouver property boom, and so their role in the city’s largest source of wealth generation, property ownership, becomes catering to those who can take part, selling to them luxury booze, food, cars, clothes, and even their bodies. We have two classes of society forming along a divide that is growingly difficult to cross.
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