Students Are Now Flying Hundreds of Miles to Class to Avoid Sky-High Rents
This needs to stop immediately
You can’t make this up.
Thanks to the gross financialization of shelter by rent-seeking banksters and parasitic land-lorders, the cost to rent in major cities has skyrocketed.
But major cities tend to be where the major universities are, so it leaves students in a jam — do they load up with even more debt so someone can exploit their precarious situation, or do they get creative?
Some geniuses — and I say give them a degree just for the ingenuity! — have started living hundreds of miles away from their place of education in cheaper towns, then commuting to class by plane to save money.
Take Tim Chen, a resident of Calgary. A one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver would cost him $2100, so he just lives at home and then pays $1200/month to fly twice per week to Vancouver for class, at a cost of $150 per round-trip.
In the USA, a kid named Bill couldn’t afford rent in the Bay Area, so the University of California Berkeley student flew 238 flights at a cost of $5,592.66 including parking and public transportation, to avoid the ~$20,000 he would’ve had to fork over to a land-lorder.Â
(Upon graduation, Alaska Airlines gave him a one-year Flight Pass Pro Subscription so he could jet around the southwest for free.)
As funny as these stories are, they also expose something deeply troubling about life in our financialized world:
It’s killing us.
Think of how much pollution these needless flights are causing.
Think of how much youth is wasted in repaying massive debts just to learn and stay sheltered.
Think of how much worse this is going to get in the years ahead as small-time land-lorders and trillion-dollar hedge funds devour the housing market and continue jacking rents.
Remember: Land-lorders will not stop until they are stopped.
If every single Canadian and American got a second job, or all got a pay raise, or all got a fat monthly Universal Basic Income check, rents would rise accordingly. We cannot out-earn parasites. The more blood available, the fatter the vampire will grow.
Housing hardship and homelessness are at an all-time high, and we’re only getting started.
We must end the financialization and hoarding of homes before they rip apart society.
Shelter is an active human right, not a passive income stream.