When I saw the title, I wondered how a survivalist story got to front page on HN.
Then I read it and saw it was really a story about high rents, and then of course it made sense.
My sense of where the highest rents are doesn't keep up with the times though. Tokyo became relatively inexpensive long before I figured it out. New York beat London at some point, and when Vancouver had overtaken San Francisco I was floored.
I spend about 70% of my time in Vancouver. My rented house there is half the size of my place in Austin and costs 3x as much. My wife and I joke occassionally that we could leave Van for almost any other place on earth - including Manhattan - and see our COL go down.
They don't even have the building restrictions that san fran does. They're building like crazy in that city and the price per square foot just keeps going up because it's in high demand.
High demand for a place to offshore money != high demand for a place to live. The former is why the price per sqm is high. The latter would communicate that a place is actually nice to live in.
Maybe it should when the very future of that market is decided by those factors. If people aren't going to be living or utilizing those spaces the market value and actual demand will continue to deviate until at some point where it crashes and fucks over the people living there. Meanwhile the foreign investors, who likely won't be hurt by losing a property they didn't even use, won't give two shits.
It doesn't, but the question is about whether or not one wants to live in a location - which is only one of many market forces at play in determining rent prices.
Oh we love it there. It just happens to be very expensive. Thankfully the favorable exchange rate at the moment helps with other COL expenses (groceries).
The bigger issue I see is the low quality police work.
Back "in the day" it wasn't uncommon for US police to frame random black guys for crimes in order to consider the crime solved. Sticking a homeless guy in prison over something that's a natural right in other parts of the world and in the presence of substantial doubt that it was even his (plausible other reasons for his DNA to be on the gun and no motive to have it in the first place) seems to be about the same level of quality.
The lack of proof that the gun was linked to him sounded quite alarming. What I suspect happened was like the #twitterjoketrial: once anti-terrorism police had got involved, it was impossible to de-escalate it and admit it was just a homeless guy and not a secret terrorist bunker.
(The setup is superficially very similar to "stay behind" operations, so I can sort of see how someone might have panicked)
It's basically "We don't know what this, so let's call it terrorism" - which apparently includes any form of social deviance or unsanctioned initiative.
Then I read it and saw it was really a story about high rents, and then of course it made sense.
My sense of where the highest rents are doesn't keep up with the times though. Tokyo became relatively inexpensive long before I figured it out. New York beat London at some point, and when Vancouver had overtaken San Francisco I was floored.