and, no, the answer isn't to build more new houses and then try and push people up "the ladder".

i am a white person with a decent education, and i don't want to own a new house in the suburbs with a picket fence, where i need to spend hours of my time in a car to get back and forth from downtown. i reject that vision of western civilization. what i want is a small, affordable apartment in the heart of the city, where i am within bicycling distance of everything i need, and can rely on public transit in a pinch. that means i want a space in an old building in a centralized location, not a new house in the middle of nowhere.

in that sense, i'm happy to let wealthy immigrants come in and buy up the new housing, although i might criticize them on their carbon footprint. what pisses me off is when i'm forced to compete with a bunch of refugees for basic shelter, which should be my right as a citizen of the country.

so, the point that the liberals aren't grasping is that these policies that are designed to clear white people out of the low income areas by moving them into middle class areas in order to make way for refugees in the low income areas are running into the basic problem that we're living in the low income areas because the kind of class mobility being hinted at requires lifestyle choices that we don't want to make. i'm an artist. i don't want an office job. i don't want a trade union job. i don't want to buy a house or to be in the middle class. what i want is cheap rent in the slum and the freedom to create. and, if i have to compete with people for that as a consequence of some liberal politicians' vision about class mobility, i'm going to get pissy about it.