The great unhinging has begun

A frequent commenter on this site has posted an attack on local agents who are renting out homes to “bottom feeders” and “leeches” (at up to $45,000 per month, these are some bottom feeders!) for short-term — 6 months or less — periods. Apparently, he expects homeowners sitting on vacant properties to leave them empty rather than permit out-of-towners from entering our sacred land.

I’d say he was uniquely bizarre and frightened, but Portland Maine has just passed a city ordinance banning all short-term rentals and ordering anyone in such a lease to leave town by next week,

That restriction broadens the city’s stay-at-home order. City Manager Jon Jennings announced that order last week, and the City Council voted Monday night to extend it until April 27.

People who are currently in a short-term rental in Portland have until April 6 to leave. But the order means that no new bookings can take place until the city’s emergency order expires. The city reported more than 800 registered short-term rentals at one point last year.

“We can’t necessarily count on every single person who is operating them, or every single person who is visiting to abide by social distancing guidance,” Councilor Belinda Ray said.

Portland Maine is just Portland Oregon east, filled with the woke, and its denizens have an irresistible urge to regulate and ban everything that the properly-woke can’t control; they’ve been after the airbnb business for years, as well as Lyft and Uber and, for that matter, any economic activity that might provide income not sanctioned and approved by them. So this is not too-unexpected a development, but casting out strangers from their midst brings to mind images of frightened townspeople during the time of the Black Death, who attacked and murdered anyone who trespassed into their village.

This madness is getting serious, and it will only grow worse.

UPDATE: Cape Codders want to close the bridges to vacation home owners and visitors, towns in the Berkshires want to ban Airbnb and vacation rentals, Rhode Island’s unleashed its National Guard to ferret out, house-to-house, “outsiders”. I saw a brief video of Trump yesterday where he was, patiently for him, trying to explain to reporters why he was trying to keep the country calm. “You want me to scare them? Believe me, I can tell them projections that are aa hundred times worse”. The press, who lives to breed panic and who are as much of the panicked mob as the most ignorant among them, was having none of it.