My new boss invited me to go to lunch. Lunch turned out to be an awards luncheon for the downtown partnership where our group had a table. Comrades I have never seen so many faces of capital in my life. 1,000 suits and pantsuits that see the entire landscape around them as a vast frontier that they can exploit. 1,000 suits and pantsuits chowing down on salmon and applauding each other for finding the most creative and profitable ways for real estate capital to devour every untouched pocket of urban land in my city and be securitized and revitalized and gentrified to oblivion.
I don’t know how we are going to resist this absolute monolith going forward but my feeling after today is pretty bleak.
I’m looking for a new place right now, and there are places charging the equivalent of my entire paycheque which look like they’re about two years away from reno-victing all the tenants.
Every time Jagmeet Singh shows up on my FaceBook feed, I want to tell him “promise to nationalize housing, and you will become prime minister.” I know he won’t, and I know I need to stop using FaceBook, but the problem is so out of control and the solution so obvious, that it blows my mind that almost no one can even conceive it.
