Whither Our Priorities?

[peristaltor]

So The Wife™ is channel flipping last night and comes across a show from, as they say, across the pond, and English program about putting dogs in homes before Xmas. Some have to get some pretty major surgeries first; one needs to bear her pups before finding that Xmas home. They even have a royal visit to the Hammersea (?) Hospital where the pups are all seemingly gathered.

Then came one dude.

He was about my age with a large-ish black and white dog he obviously loved dearly. But he had to give him up… wait for it… because he had been evicted and was going to soon be homeless. And "a tent is no place for a dog."

We have become, it seems, so inured to the mere fact of homelessness that priority goes to making sure the dog eventually gets a happy home.

Comments

[ironphoenix]

Well, clearly it was the guy's own fault that he would be homeless, but why should the dog suffer for his misdeeds?

[peristaltor]

Without knowing his circumstances, I can't say it's his fault, let alone that the fault was clear. I've been homeless and working, so I'm familiar with a real estate market gone bananas so much so that low income people find themselves sleeping in cars and shower surfing between shifts.

I was a bit tired when I posted, but I was going to put in a prejudice from a local transit group: to encourage mass transit, they want to (among other things) do away as much as possible with single family housing. It isn't compact enough (they say) to make transit efficient.

And here's the problem. Other than condos——which are really warmed-over apartments sold to the residents——what dwelling option other than a single-family house allows the resident to accrue capital as they dwell there?

This is a massive blind spot in our Western finance thinking, one that exacerbates the income inequality, this time between owners and renters. Making more renters just makes more rentiers and more people victim to the whims of them.

[ironphoenix]

Um, you realize that my previous comment was intended as (somewhat bitter) irony, right?

Rentiers aren't my favorite folks... we are on the residents' association board for our little neighborhood, and there are a lot of absentee landlords who seem to give a **** only about their rent income.

[m_cobweb]

I'm guessing it's Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
https://www.battersea.org.uk/
Quite famous in the UK!

I'm most likely to give money to panhandlers with pets. I can't even imagine trying to keep my pets fed and safe under those circumstances.