By Steve Sailer
12/13/2016
We need some new conceptual categories to complement Fake News, such as Lame News: articles that have been intentionally hamstrung to avoid triggering Social Justice Warriors. Here’s a factually correct and somewhat informative New York Times article about a hippie town in British Columbia.
Try to figure out how it has been lamed so that most readers won’t understand what’s really going on.
With Flood of Urbanites, a Canadian Hippie Haven Tries to Keep Its MellowBy DAN LEVIN DEC. 11, 2016
NELSON, British Columbia — Marijuana, Vietnam War draft dodgers and artists gave Nelson its tree-hugging, bohemian soul.
This remote mountain town in British Columbia has recently welcomed a new wave of settlers: urban refugees, increasingly priced out of cities like Vancouver and yearning for a simpler life. …
Many of Nelson’s recent transplants fled Canadian cities, where even a couple in cubicle professions can struggle to get by. …
But Nelson’s charms have become something of a curse. The recent influx of people to this compact town of 10,000 has led to an affordable housing crisis, set off by bidding wars over its scarce housing stock and a zero percent rental vacancy rate caused in part by homeowners who rent their properties to tourists through sites like Airbnb.
Nelson’s homeless shelter has been full for months, and some residents, unable to find a place to rent, spent the spring and summer living in tents or trailers in the town’s campground. The local community college lost around 60 students this year because they could not find housing, officials said.
Nelson’s housing crisis echoes a wider problem in booming British Columbia, where tight real estate markets, diminished government support for affordable housing and rising inflation have spawned a vacancy rate of 1.3 percent, and made rentals virtually impossible to find in Vancouver, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. …
Balancing Nelson’s economic future and cultural heritage is complicated by the town’s cramped mountainside locale. “Geographically we can’t do sprawl,” Mayor Kozak said. Still, she said that Nelson was working to develop a “full spectrum” of housing to ease the crisis, while trying to address the concerns of residents worried that new development will ruin their counterculture paradise.
New arrivals are not complaining. Adam Thomas, 42, who moved to Nelson in July with his family after selling their Vancouver home, said that even dual incomes there were no longer enough to keep them out of debt.
… “We felt trapped in Vancouver,” he said, seated by the fire in the three-bedroom house they purchased for $250,000. …
His wife found an office job and he dived into the town’s communal economy, teaching at the local college and working at the co-op radio station.
… “It’s like living in the 1990s,” he said.
This article is pretty interesting to iSteve readers armed with useful concepts like Supply and Demand: a bunch of white urban liberals economically shoved out of their dream city of Vancouver by mass immigration from Asia are trying to squeeze into the rare small town that they find culturally compatible.
But the first thing that has been cut out of the article is any direct mention that this is another example of Leftwing White Flight. You and I are familiar with the concept (e.g., Portland, OR and Portland, ME), and thus we can notice that almost everybody in the article fleeing to remote Nelson is white. But most poor dumb NYT readers are clueless that there is such a Thing as Leftwing White Flight and this article isn’t going to bring up a conceptual category that would make them uncomfortable.
Second, why are all these nice white people unable to afford to live in Vancouver anymore? Well, you know and I know it’s because of Canada’s massive legal immigration levels causing Asian immigrants’ demand for housing in Vancouver to drive prices through the roof: the Law of Supply and Demand applies to immigration-related realities, just as it applies to everything else. But if you do a text search for “MIGR” you won’t see any words like “immigration” or “migrants” in the article. Instead, you just get this extremely bland paragraph about causes:
Nelson’s housing crisis echoes a wider problem in booming British Columbia, where tight real estate markets, diminished government support for affordable housing and rising inflation have spawned a vacancy rate of 1.3 percent, and made rentals virtually impossible to find in Vancouver, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. …
That’s not just lame, it’s been intentionally lamed to not mention any interesting words for what’s going on in Vancouver that’s driving white people to Nelson, such as “immigrant” or “Chinese” or “highly capitalist Communist Party members.”
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.