The Downtown Dilemma

So I wrote about being positive while living and working in Fort Mcmurray but so many deride this town that you have to think that there is something to it. These accounts of it being a hellish place haven't sprung from thin air have they?

The problems of Fort Mcmurray are intertwined with the things that make it a great place to live. The very same folk who tout this as being a great place to work and live have to understand that some of them have created the problems that this city has.
The most prevalent complaint is the cost of housing and this is something that is not, as the good people of Ft. Mac would have you believe, driven by forces outside of the town true land has been doled out bits at a time there by creating demand without steady supply but this is not what forces the price of land high at least not by its self. This is simply people thinking that they should get as much as anyone else for their little piece of real estate. This is not an evil thing it is a mild and somewhat justified by circumstance greed.
Greed is the thing that people see here more so than the cities to the south where there is some sense and a bit more control over rental property. The cost of everything is at least slightly inflated because you have to pay your staff more to compensate for the ridiculous rates of rent.
Here is the downtown dilemma: If you work on site you make enough per month where $600-$800 for renting a room is not a big deal, you can afford it. Heck you could and might just rent a two bedroom apartment for $2100-2600 a month and share with a room mate. 
The guy working at Canadian tire for $18 an hour is not going to be able to afford that kind of rent and from what I see the landowners are going to make it impossible to keep an employee. 
I'd love to entertain the thought that this is all market driven but it is not. You have large corporations who control the vast majority of rental space and they raise rents continually but not just when the market has a low vacancy rate it is pretty much a continuous upward curve. 
The next one is lack of service or bad service, read the above and you might conclude that the rent issue has a far reaching effect. 
I know my performance is built on my environment both home and work so I'm sure that the typical stock person at the Superstore is not the happiest of campers when half of his salary goes to rent.
So local business has a very hard time retaining employees and in step the off shore workers, the contract workers. They by and large come here with accommodation arranged and most find it to be so much better than home that the rent is a forgivable evil. These workers also seek the big wages and too often they leave a contract and get duped by some scumbag into working a ridiculous amount of hours and then short you or not pay at all leaving you high and dry. 
Don't get me wrong I truly see the good things in Fort Mac, the surrounding countryside, just get over the bits ravaged or modified for the oil industry, the relatively clean air so long as the tar sands ain't in the wind, the wonderful people so long as they don't end up going crackers and then hustle you.
The problems in Fort Mac exist in some form in any boom town but it is our boom town as in Canada's boom town beyond that it seems that everything about a boom town is disproportionate same with this one.
Traffic jams, murder/suicide rates, crime, wages, EVERYTHING!
So you see I still have nothing negative to say about FM because I'd say the same of any boom town.