r0dman.com

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.