Watched the news tonight, where one of the channels (probably One, but I was switching so often I don’t honestly remember) interviewed the woman who lives in the state house that’s worth $2m.
She was surprised at this, and the interviewer took great pains to point out the lack of ice makers, marble desktops etc.
Which is kind of shooing yourself in the foot – the house is worth $2,000,000 without all those things.
They failed completely to answer the question on everyone’s lips: would you move out to give up to 7 extra families a house?
What she did say was something along the lines of “I think it’s everyone’s right to have a house with a big backyard and a good view”. Nice thought, but there’s a bit of a problem with that – the fact that these things are desirable dictates under the laws of logic that all cannot have them.
So who does get them? We can do it one of two ways:
1) the person with the most money who is prepared to pay the most money
2) the random person at the top of the queue, regardless of how much they value those things.
Note that (1) is quite different from “the person with the most money”. I might have $10m, but there’s no way I’d buy that place. I’d rather buy a place for $250,000 and put the other $9,750,000 into something productive.
And that’s the point here – it would actually help a lot more people to sell this property and build several more units without the flash view and a modest-size lawn the rest of us have to live with. Let the rich waste their money buying something that’s vastly overpriced. The state’s self-appointed job is to provide cheap housing, and that’s what it should stick to.
Something should go here, maybe later. 