Closing The Divide, 3

The property developers are a particularly virulent scum on our urban landscape. They are driven and motivated by profit, or shall we say, simple old-fashioned greed. They are the particularly insidious and reprehensible Trojan Horse that our short-sighted, corrupt and venal elected officials have opened the gates to, swallowing, or rather, expecting the rest of us to swallow the vile nonsense of market freedom and priorities over a cohesive and secure social infrastructure that can work for everybody. We saw this in our own current Mayor Moonbeam, an admitted progressive, who allowed major property development corporations to fund his campaign, provide gifts, kickbacks and other bribes, in exchange for unmitigated and unregulated freedom to raze to the ground major portions of this city, not to develop housing that would be affordable and accessible to everyone, regardless of their income, but to the wealthy, especially wealthy foreigners, speculators and property flippers. Scum every bit as vile as the developers themselves, whose only interest is to serve their own greed and hunger for wealth and power, not to mention that many of these same vectors of this pandemic of gentrification are themselves connected with international crime and money laundering. I don't need stats or references to back up this accusation, Gentle Reader, because you can read all about it in the Globe and Mail, if you want. Or just do a simple Google search. Despite their reprehensibility and complete lack of ethics and no moral compass, I am placing the developers in third place, because our elected politicians, and home owners, being themselves citizens with public responsibilities and obligations, have the greater blame, and through their own greed and lack of ethics, the gates have been opened to such powerful and socially destructive agents. Developers are not interested in social housing for the simple reason that it isn't profitable. They want to make money. Tons of money. They do not care that their morally bankrupt actions are making this city unaffordable to all but the wealthy. I can only still live here because of the blessing of government-subsidized housing and regardless of how much our city and provincial governments are scrambling to build more subsidized housing, it is too little too late. That horse ran out of the barn years ago and it is going to take us decades before we can catch up and really undo the damage that has been wreaked on our social infrastructure thanks to this unchecked and deregulated market greed that has overtaken our cities and our lives. In the meantime, our sidewalks are choked with homeless beggars with no place else to go, here in one of the world's richest and most prosperous countries. Our city is being hollowed out as low nd middle income families have to live elsewhere because they can no longer to pay rent or mortgages here while raising a family. Housing is not a luxury. Housing is not an investment. Housing is not a gift or a reward for working hard all you life at a thankless job. Housing is a fundamental human right and it is time that our country started to wake up to this fact and include housing as a human right into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and for the rest of us to integrate this fact into our way of thinking. Housing as a human right has long been enshrined in UN charters nd documents, it is accepted as fact in many other countries that ironically do not have our magnitude of homelessness and housing unaffordability and it is time for us in Canada to get our heads out of the sand and out of our asses and begin to really move forward on this vital and pressing issue.