Illusion of wealth.

Re: "'Depressing' report defines housing affordability in Saanich: $428,000, $605,000", May 17.

Defining "affordable" housing in terms of "pressure on the housing market" is counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin because the actual problem at hand is that affordability is not something that can be achieved in a "housing market".

In the deindustrialized, financialized economy that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in in 1981, only the illusion of wealth can be created, as actual wealth creation is offshored and ever-higher priced assets, like housing, are sold by one holder to the next.

Housing treated as poker chips and imagined to be wealth ties up households' entire life savings in housing that eventually becomes so expensive that only hedge funds can afford to buy it, at which point thousands of single-family dwellings become rentals and are rented out at prices only the most generously compensated workers can pay.

Ottawa's housing policy since 1993 -- leaving housing construction and rental housing management to "investors" in "housing markets" -- saw to it that plenty of housing was built for the wealthiest Canadians (pieds a terre, second homes, "investment" condos to rent out at prices determined by the "market") and plenty of low-functioning individuals and priced-out low-end workers wound up living on the street.

The word "investment" was redefined in the 1980s from financing plant and equipment, R&D, and employing labor to create useful products and perform useful work, to gambling in the derivatives casino, the purple chips in which are mortgages and rents.

This is why calls to lock up smelly homeless people -- living in tents because "the market" put them there -- by entitled narcissists who view and have treated society for the last 40 years as anonymous "others" from whom to extract money, are pathetic.

The real criminals in this story are the predators who transformed housing from shelter people live in to illusory units of "wealth", while the actual wealth our country was blessed with -- clean air, clean water, abundant forests, prairies, and seas -- have been mercilessly savaged to acquire money to pay for housing.

During the current lull in this early heatwave that is a harbinger of killer wet bulb temperatures and monster wildfires to come, it is not too late for Canadians to wake up to the fact that "markets" turning strangers into targets from whom to extract unearned income is a terrible model upon which to organize a society. Nor is it too late to learn from Indigenous ways of pulling together how to live here for millennia instead of wiping ourselves out chasing money.