Home prices in her new hometown spiked about 20% in the last year. MORRIS: To Williams Bay, Wis., a town of about 2,600 on a small lake. I moved from Seattle, which had been seeing price growth for quite some time, to a rural part of Wisconsin. MORRIS: And prospective buyers like Yoder are driving up rural home prices, according to Daryl Fairweather, an economist with the real estate brokerage Redfin.ĭARYL FAIRWEATHER: People are moving towards places that are more affordable because of remote work that they wouldn't have considered before. And Velasquez's brother-in-law Craig Yoder says that coming from California, they're wielding substantial buying power in rural Missouri.ĬRAIG YODER: We have three good incomes and three properties that we can sell in California for a big - I own my house outright. They're approaching retirement and say that California has become too expensive and, for them, too liberal. MORRIS: Velasquez, along with his wife and her siblings, are shopping for property here. VELASQUEZ: You know why? People like us coming out here is why you've got a shortage on homes. MORRIS: On a recent morning, the small real estate office on the square in Osceola is full of Californians like Robert Velasquez. It's smaller than it was a century ago, and home prices were in the basement for decades before the pandemic hit. Take Osceola, Mo., a town of 900 an hour beyond the outskirts of Kansas City. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.įRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: For years, the runup in housing prices passed by vast stretches of so-called flyover country. Of course, this survey was conducted before the public learned that wolves, bobcats and lynx are being farmed for their fur.You can usually find real estate in rural towns for less than what you would pay to live in a city, but the pandemic has sparked high housing prices across the country in rural places that don't usually see them. The Canadian public is firmly opposed to fur farming, an attitude aligned with public sentiment towards this practice in many other jurisdictions.Ī 2022 public opinion survey found that three-quarters of Canadians would support a national ban on fur farming. If this initiative is successful, Canada would become one of the last remaining countries in the world with an active fur farm sector, with the U.S., Iceland, China and Russia for company. Nearly 20 countries have ended fur farming, and a citizen’s initiative to ban fur farming across the European Union is currently in front of the European Commission. Throughout the pandemic, several countries banned fur farming over concerns of the sector’s public health risks associated with COVID-19.īritish Columbia banned mink farming in 2021 over its threat to public health, becoming the first province in Canada to do so. Internationally, Canada will be known as one of the only (if not the only) country that is known to commercially farm wolves, bobcats and lynx for their fur.Ī recent review article examined the global fur farm sector and identified 15 different animal species being farmed for their fur in at least 19 countries the three aforementioned species were not named in this review.Ĭanada is on a shrinking list of countries where fur farming is legal and practised. This includes environmental pollution in Nova Scotia, animal cruelty in Quebec, threats to public health in British Columbia, and tens of millions of public dollars spent to keep the dying industry on life support. The discovery of these fur farms in the two prairie provinces adds to the Canadian fur farm industry’s already awful track record. While Ontario and Nova Scotia are the largest fur-producing provinces, both home to dozens of large industrial mink farms, Alberta and Saskatchewan are not typically known for fur production. Our research found that there is one lynx fur farm operating in Alberta, and five fur farms operating in Saskatchewan housing one or more of these species: wolves, bobcats, lynx and foxes. This shocking discovery sheds light on a dark industry operating in Canada, one that keeps wildlife captive so that their fur pelts can be sold abroad and used in luxury fashion fur products.
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