On Rejecting Housing Proposals
The role of the Council, The Guppian Trap, and escaping to the Continent
An inordinate amount of commercial building requests have piled up at the council office in my absence. Companies seem to have been emboldened by several proposals for housing reform made recently by the Housing Minister, though none of these have, nor are ever likely to, be implemented.
Where once I rejected these proposals out of pure necessity — the red tape of local government rendering them all but impossible to approve anyway — I am now making a concentrated effort to ensure that no commercial planning application, no matter how small, has any chance of coming to fruition.
Should the most modest application for housing development cross my desk, I have taken every step to ensure its failure: I have contacted the local paper, warning them of “high-rise monstrosities” which threaten to loom over and steal privacy from the local dogging park; I have driven around the quietest of residential areas playing loud “Jungle Music” from my car speakers in order to frighten residents; I have wandered into the local retirement home disguised as an Indian (complete with achkan jacket and turban) to leer menacingly at the residents.
As I am property-less, the reader might ask why I would act in a way so contrary to my own material interests. It is my belief that the United Kingdom’s population has swelled to such a point, and its economic growth so diminished, that further housing (should it ever be built) is only likely to encourage even greater immigration and birth rates than said housing can satisfy, the swollen population of which would plunge us into an even more desperate economic situation than we are currently experiencing. This I term the Guppian Trap, and I would encourage all students of economics to use it liberally in their papers.
There is no avoiding the Guppian Trap, there is only delaying it. It is therefore in my best interests to reduce the supply of housing, given that scarcity will increase the value of Mother’s property, which I will later inherit. With this equity under arm, I will be able to sell Mother’s house in order to purchase two or three properties in Italy where, the economy being less developed, the Guppian Trap is least likely to reach me within my lifetime.
This scheme can go on indefinitely within a family, as long as there is a country less developed than that which one finds oneself in. When the Guppian Trap eventually reaches Italy, my children will flee to Latin America, and my later descendents may even end up purchasing an entire village in Sub Saharan Africa. And, at this rate of accumulation of real estate, they may within one-hundred years be able to buy a nice maisonette in Shephard’s Bush.
