Dearest Reader,
I congratulate you on making it to the final page of an issue specializing in what many have found a dour and depressing subject, if indeed one of concern to so many of us. Unless of course you have flicked idly to this section like some sort of journalistic savage, taking articles and columns à la carte just as you please. In which case, begone and return only when you have perused the previous material like a good and loyal reader!
Have the others gone? Very well then, I shall give my own my own thoughts on the tragic state of B.C.’s rental and housing systems — for in fact, I have recently conducted some significant research into the matter myself. To begin, I solicited the advice of one particular acquaintance, who alone among my friends has remained entirely untouched by the rental crisis. Thus, I suspected he might harbour some nugget of advice by which the rest of us may escape our current troubles. This fellow educated me in the alarming reality that the rental crisis is entirely a product of millennial laziness and poor budgeting practices. He presented to me his own system of financial management, the key practices of which include buying only the least expensive household brands, returning beverage containers for recycling money, and receiving a small monthly rental allowance of $1 200 from his parents. Clearly, all of us may gain by such pragmatic advice, and I was particularly intrigued by this notion of being born to a wealthy and generous family. His parents are in the property management business, I am told, and by this clever stroke, they were also able to find their son an ideally-placed apartment through their own company. The genius of my friend in averting his own iteration of the common crisis was by this time becoming apparent to me. Through the hard work of scrounging, saving, and leveraging the convenience of his parents’ business, he had risen above the financial depression so many of us face.
I offered the advice I had gathered to a number of tent-dwelling city denizens on my subsequent walk up Pandora, politely explaining that they had overinvested in the “bottle-recycling” part of my friend’s scheme, and they should instead focus on the “rich parents” angle. They demurred, and one instead offered to reacquaint me with the nuances of sharp bottles and cans. Truly, great ideas are wasted on small minds.
Lastly, having noted that we have again reached the ‘20s, and that there has been much recent talk of reinvigorating elements of the culture of a century past, I thought it fitting to solicit financial advice from publications of that time. As such writings have proven to me, most of us are in fact wasting our money on a university education, when the average lifelong company career requires only a high school diploma. I suspect, based on this research, that most of us are paid so poorly due to our disdain for company loyalty. So many people I know have held multiple minimum-wage jobs before even the age of 20! We must learn to do our time, stay 40 years working our way through a promising company (a 1923 Time issue suggests one ‘De Beers Diamond’ as a company to watch!) and collect our gold watches in time for retirement.
Much has been made of alternative solutions to the housing emergency. From micro homes to urban reinvestment to legal measures aimed at combating artificial rental inflation, it seems everyone has an idea. Tempting though some of these may sound, I remind my readers that those with wealthy families have a long history of success whatever the historic or financial climate, and that for sheer reliability, such an approach cannot be bested. Fortune, it turns out, favours not so much the brave as the already fortunate. Who could have imagined?
