Government Funded Housing Bubble
It must be nice to pick up a copy of the local paper, read it, and believe 100% of what is written. Maybe I’m just too cynical.
I read an article today about the Victorian state government buying 10,000 hectares of grassland, with an additional 50,000 hectares being considered. The land is being purchased “to compensate for rare grasslands lost with the expansion of Melbourne’s urban boundary”.
So land that the government sold off years ago for a song, now is being purchased back by the government at top dollar no doubt. When everyone is told that there is a “shortage of land”, clearly having the government buy it from the developers is just going to create a greater shortage, right? Either that or the government are trying to encourage a shortage – dare I say, to prop up the housing prices?
If your intentions are just to keep house prices high, it makes sense I suppose. Encourage population growth, limit new land developments, and force people to cram into the cities – it will force land prices to stay high.
Our good friend Obama plans similar things. Fifty cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore, once industrial boom towns, are now abandoned by business with no future employment in sight, and as a result most residents have followed suit. The neighborhoods are now filled with abandoned homes, and some low income families.
Decaying houses are bulldozed, and with the removal of existing residents, entire neighborhoods will be levelled, returning the land to nature. There’s not much information on how the displaced families are compensated for losing their house in this process!
I just can’t see information like this without ulterior motives staring me right in the face. The way I see it:
- Either there is a huge surplus in land (which it’s alleged that there isn’t) so it is ok to reclaim the land for nature, or
- Property values are far too high, and a shortage needs to be created to prop up these values.
I’m all for “greening the earth”, just not when it is an underhanded attempt to keep a bubble inflated.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Jase, a common theme I see between your country and mine under Obama seems to be herding citizens into population centers.
My suspicion is it that it has less to do with propping up land values than gaining more control of the people.
Here in the states, we see our automobiles demonized and gas prices forced higher and higher. We see housing bulldozed and existing any existing families remaining relocated into more “affluent” areas, most likely high rise government owned projects.
We see foods demonized and regulated and every effort to disarm the population. Even certain business are forced into closure or forced to outsource their employment, leaving people even more dependent upon government.
The only reason I can think of that makes sense on all of it is control, plain and simple.
Tragically, I fear it is going to trigger a major uprising in the US.
Hope I’m wrong.
June 17th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I agree with that Lew. While Australia is a fair way behind the US, we are still becoming a police state at a rate of knots. Unfortunately most Australian’s don’t realise this and in a lot of cases are happy for additional regulations or more laws that “protect” them, when in reality they do the exact opposite.
An uprising may not be such a bad thing. I believe we are in store for some massive changes – why can’t they be changes for the better?
June 18th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Crikey! Thanks for the heads-up Lew. Damn those “liberal elite”.
*Puts on tinfoil hat*
There!
June 18th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Funnily enough, tin foil hats have been found to amplify frequency bands known to be used my US government agencies.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
Maybe we are safe in Aus though lol.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:10 am
The thing that pisses me off is that as a democratic nation they hold an election but when the outcome doesn’t suit them they clean out every gun shop in the place and mutter about uprisings. It’s disgraceful, hypocritical and scary paranoid. Talk about a bunch of (insane) sore losers!
Then again, maybe we should encourage it (after all, that’s what the CIA does when a foreign government doesn’t suit their needs). They could bomb themselves “back to the stone age” while we go about our business.