Comment 25625

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 21, 2008 at 14:35:07

If we want "free markets", we need to get large development firms out of them. They select development styles which suit their needs - converting vast areas of farmland into the biggest and most expensive housing lots possible, with houses built as quickly and cheaply as they can get away with. When they develop downtown, they seek only to attract the wealthiest customers (hence the condo boom) and do little or nothing for the existing, middle or low-income residents of these neighbourhoods. If an area does not seem ripe for high-income housing, they simply sit on properies until the area is, or the rot. They design these buildings with little or no input at all from customers, who rarely have any recourse once it's all over. All of this takes place in the context of a highly subsidized automobile transportation system, media panic about the dangers of living in urban areas and a few levels of government who have been bending over backward for developers for years (and paying little attention if any, to the actual problems causing "urban blight", like poverty).

Look at how this has ended in the past...do consumers really want large, drab Effort Trust appartment buildings? No, but other options aren't abounding. Customer choice, like voting, only gives us a choice between options others have chosen for us. This shapes We live in a finite city, with finite space, and there are simply not the infinite options available for us to give market systems real input. The choices available to us shape our perceptions of our real choices, and then people are left believing that their only options are suburb or slum.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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