On the way into town this morning to fetch my Saturday Globe and Mail, I noticed one of the neighbours has a new ATV. He's got a wee trailer hooked up to it, and he's dutifully picking up assorted debris left by yesterday's wind storm.
His yard is maybe a quarter the size of mine, and there's no reason he couldn't collect that detritus with a wheelbarrow. But no, he's got a ten thousand dollar ATV and a trailer to do the deed.
That's emblematic of the way we roll, isn't it?
Back in the day, every factory worker could afford their own little bungalow on a fifty foot lot in the city. When those post-WWII bungalows were put up they sold for under ten thousand dollars. The trend today is for the upwardly mobile to buy those bungalows for half a million, or a million and a half in many Toronto neighbourhoods, bulldoze them, and put up a three or four thousand square foot McMansion with five or six bathrooms on that fifty foot lot.
No factory worker today aspires to a detached dwelling of their own. It just doesn't happen.
Back in the fifties and sixties you could raise up a family of four or five kids in a thousand square feet with one bathroom. The folks razing those houses and putting up monster homes might have one or two children and a Filipino nanny.
Do they live happier lives than the original inhabitants of those homes?
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