On my way to work yesterday, I noticed the front page of the local paper – “Priced Out? Problems and Solutions for Metro Vancouver’s housing market”. This type of headline grabs my attention because I know what’s going to follow; entitled whining about how the average person can’t afford the large, multi bedroom detached house in the city that is their right by birth. The article itself was a collection of reader responses to a previous feature. Reading through the stories, I was bewildered at what the average person thinks they should be able to afford in a major world city. I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite extensively, and I can tell you that the detached house just doesn’t exist in any major urban area. Paris? Mixed use buildings with retail below, apartments above. Berlin? Uniform, six-story residential buildings with common ground level entrances. I don’t hear these people complaining.
Changing times cause for changing ideals. As cities get bigger, they grow UP, not OUT. Thankfully, our municipal government understands this and is committed to making this city one of the world’s greenest. I say good riddance to all the entitled, gas guzzling suburbanite’s.
Thankfully there is a large online community that agrees and supports this vision – here’s just a few selections from the past week:
- CF and I have always been fairly anti-microwave. There’s just something about heating food using micro-waves of energy that just doesn’t seem natural. However, The Simple Dollar raised the point that there are times in which using the microwave is actually more efficient. “Don’t Use the Stove when the Microwave will do” explains that microwaves are actually really good at heating up liquids. The calculations showing the energy and time savings of heating water and other liquids is quite compelling.
- There has been a lot of talk lately about paying down debt vs. saving for retirement. Finance Fox lays out the options and weighs the pro’s and con’s. It’s nice to see a Canadian take on this problem! Last year, I chose to focus on debt reduction while maintaining a small accumulation of investment funds. This year, it’s investing time!
Carnival roundup
This week, The Outlier Model appeared in:
