alt Hacker NewsWhile it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .
In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!
Both of you are really just beating around the bush of this whole issue in basically the same way as the very people you are complaining about, albeit at a different position. You both have a very elitist mentality towards this issue, i.e., “those peasants should move out of the way for superior people like me”, when what you are both describing is ironically failure of the privileged and powerful to understand what is causing the problems, conflicts, and tension; their own behaviors, actions, and mentalities.
Maybe the indigenous population you have contempt for wanting to preserve their communities and cultures don’t want your colonialist mindset of “those savages are not utilizing the land as I wish, so we can just overrule, overrun, and take it from them. How dare they not avert their eyes, for I have a job at booking.com or I go to UT/work at Oracle/Tesla.
It’s funny how you types never suggest that newcomers, i.e., colonizers, pay a high price for their colonization and that go to the indigenous, even if just to compensate them for the imposition and abuse. You always seem to insist on wanting to kick the indigenous from atop your high horse and demand they make way to your superiority as you abuse and exploit them. You’re not any different than any other past form of this colonist mentality, you want to steal from and abuse the indigenous.