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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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East-Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) appears to have caught the flu of the mortgage crisis spreading on the other side of the southern border. The new housing starts are down; the general statistics from Canada make this phenomenon less apparent because of the still booming western provinces. The crisis in these two largest Canadian provinces gets worse by the fact that the falling American demand leads to bankruptcy many of the local forest enterprises that supply building materials. But there is a light in the end of the tunnel; a possible way out of the crisis is to find new market; in fact, this is a creation of a new social demand that went marginal in the past, the summerhouses for upper and upper-middle class, households with annual incomes of more than $100,000.

The capitalism doesn't satisfy ever-growing demands for goods and services only; the capitalism actually creates demands where they don't exist, perhaps this is one of the reasons for its economic longevity. Examples just fly around us. Every time somebody calls you, offering you something new, either totally new or just an upgrade to something you already have, ask yourself, do you really need this new stuff? Will you be better off if you accept the offer? Or, are you considering having this upgrade because it will better match your new image you have about yourself, an image that producers want to impose on you? I understand that if everybody asked these simple questions, then probably we would have still lived in an era when all that most people needed was to have food (any food), plus roof above the head, plus some minimum security (that what the governments are for), plus some income to meet the ends. If we have PCs and Internet now, it's not because they satisfy some basic natural needs, in many countries they still remain preserved domain for upper classes.

The home is something very special for anybody, regardless of economic status and historic time. Within the western part of modern world, people moved from one to another type of residence that best matched the concept of home. Two or three hundred years ago, before the industrial revolution, the cities were exclusively occupied by merchant middle class, courts and aristocracy (in Europe), their servants, and urban poverty. The urban middle class had nothing to do outside the cities (still under feudal jurisdiction); for it the city was home; the rural people got rarely to the cities, for them the villages were home. The industrial revolution brought big confusion in this clear-cut class picture. The workers could go back and forth between the villages and the cities; the upper middle class could have secondary summer residences outside the cities. After the World War II, there was another confusion going on; the lower middle class and the working class produced a new large middle class; at the same time the transportation revolution made possible living peacefully 'as if' people still lived in the villages, but preserving all the modern benefits of the urban life. The ideal 'average' family had to live somewhere between half an hour and one hour from work by car, and the ideal type of residence was the detached or semi-detached house in the suburbs.

This is about to change again. Not fundamentally, but quite significantly. After several decades of growth, it seems that many markets have reached their point of saturation. The ideal 'average' family could upgrade from semi-detached to detached bungalow, and probably build another floor on the top; the 'average' family, however, will hardly have another bungalow just like the first one, which is intended to satisfy both the urban and the rural needs of the family. This satisfaction represents natural limitation, but as it has become clear from the current article, the capitalism doesn't accept any 'natural' limitations. At least some people must be convinced that 'having more than one' is better than having 'just one'. In a time of crisis it will be hard enough for those who already have problems with repaying their loans. But not all people live in this group; the upper and the upper-middle class could be of help; they therefore become targets of commercial campaign that aims to change their self-perception and make them ready to apply for another loan.

There are several elements in this campaign. First, people must get a big dose of non satisfaction; the urban life (including the suburban life) are depicted in terms that must lead to natural conclusions that people cannot relax completely in such aggressive social environment. Second, in contrast to this world of tension and brutality, there is a peaceful world of relaxation among the nature. Third, some facts become public that today the summerhouses are not like they used to be, small, dirty, and without most basic utilities; in fact the modern version of the summerhouses offers everything we are already accustomed to, plus the total relaxation. Fourth, the campaign makes appeal to those who want to be singled out above the crowd; living in suburbs may erase to a degree the class differences inside the majority of the people; having 'more than one' instead of 'just one' will clearly show who's on the top of what's still called a middle class.

If this campaign succeeds, then we may expect a biggest ever restructuring of the real estate residential market since the suburban model was first introduced after the World War II and the more recent gentrification mini-revolution. It will also herald a split within the large middle class into two uneven subgroups, those just having enough to move to the suburbs and those having too much to maintain alternative lifecycle both within and outside the larger cities.

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