I think you’re describing a thresholding function - the discontinuity where the income potential of the people you want to live around falls below the price determined by the invisible hand or if you prefer, the number determined by the pumped up gambler inside every would be competitor for that same space. I ask, why do so many people with more money like what you like? Elsewhere you say you don’t want to live around boring rich people. In Australia, we are all rich, globally speaking, so therefore, all boring?

You’re right to point out that other communities, to which you would represent the same evil force of gentrification, are on the verge of complaining of the same thing, should you arrive and stink up their sleepy hollow with all your metrosexual monopoly money.

There are two sides of this coin that I think should not be separated. One is the effort and reward of building of community value at what you present as an absolute cost determined by your apparent earning potential and that of your favourite weirdos. The second side is the delta improvement of earning potential that you and those same favourite weirdos could attain instead. To be precise this delta is relative to the price-competitive demand - quite high if there are loads of cashed up, motivated boring people who are chasing the dream you created but who represent something of a fart in the elevator. These two sides of the coin are functions over time, affected by your decisions predominantly but also by the influence you wield in such eloquent articles as your audience rise up and seize the means of profit.

Or, you could make bank ethically and become a patron of the arts.

One might have the skills to acquire the means to fund Marrickville 2.0. How could you? Either through taking some of your precious attention and spending it on increasing the market value for your skills or through writing another blog post about collectivisation and systems or the education of your weirdos in generating the necessary funds without being besmirched by the capitalism of it all. Indeed it seems you have been asking these questions elsewhere.

Or, to flip the coin back again, maybe we need to adopt the living habits of immigrants? Brothers and sisters living together and pooling resources. More people in the warehouse with collective ownership and getting fucking organised in all the ways etc.

I don’t want to hear that this can’t be done any more than you want to hear that establishing a new colony in the promised land is infeasible.

Hell yeah I’m triggered. Personally I find a tiresome inevitability where so few perceive it or discuss it: it is self-flagellation for inner-west anti-capitalism to be driven by a religious dogma that at once insists that a right to a place be funded by forced acquisition of resources via political control (somehow, against all evidence that it will succeed) and also a mandated fervour to keep one’s hands clean of the nasty work required to acquire such resources. Learn business, marketing, finance, science, technology and maths! If to do so is to become the enemy then we should see the consequence is I lose the rat race, which means not only am I a rat, but I’m a loser! I suggest one needs these skills more than many things still taught in schools today, and more than ever.

Why doom ourselves to such inner conflict? Starving artists cannot make better art if they starve to death! If making art is the priority rather than merely leaving a corpse with pure artistic intentions, then we should suit up and take the advice of some of the most successful artists, taking charge of the responsibility to deliver volume and value, and to be paid. The landlord is no artist? The vendor is no artist? Is that because what they offer is only of little value to us (unlike high art) whereas all this mob of competitors are confused and offer prices that are objectively too high?

It reminds me of omnivores vs vegans. At least vegans can rationally claim a right to disgust at having blood on their hands whereas meat eaters who find slaughter distasteful ought to look in the mirror. If you live in a place so many others want to live, you have benefactors by virtue of the profit they make. As opaque and long as the chain, may be, it’s still a transitive fact: daddy has blood diamonds.

I recognise I’ve taken this somewhat sideways but here’s the zinger. This is all stolen land we are haggling over.