Thomas Sowell on affordable housing and its opponents: 

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of “affordable housing” as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters… One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up. This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge… When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the “complex” question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

Old Holborn steers ladies to the radical lover of their dreams. Seriously, brace those loins for impact. 

And Mick Hartley quotes David Brown on the Shoreditch “anti-gentrification” protesters and their class war credentials: 

Adam Barr, 23, the editor of Freedom News, a left-wing online newspaper, dismissed criticism of the protest as “reactionary bourgeois drivel” on a blog post on his website yesterday. “The Cereal Killer café is a legitimate target for protest as a symbol of the invading hordes that have taken over Shoreditch,” he added. Mr Barr, the son of a company director from East Yorkshire, could not be reached for comment.

In short, it seems the protesters are the usual clumping of middle-class academics and charmless misfits. The nearest thing to an actual member of the downtrodden proletariat seems to be the self-described “class warrior” and “rebel ethnographer” Dr Lisa McKenzie, currently blunting minds at the London School of Economics. Readers may recall Dr McKenzie from this video here, in which she explains that her academic role entails “not trying to find out something.” Instead, her purpose is to “challenge” the “negative stereotypes” of rough council housing neighbourhoods. Curiously, Dr McKenzie attempts this by proudly showing us graffiti – sorry, “muriels” – that actually confirm those stereotypes – of gangs, vandalism, car theft and, as she puts it, “young people who have died on the estate.” And Dr McKenzie does all this, quite earnestly, while a police helicopter rumbles overhead.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.