Øyvind Snibsøer

Read Time:2 Minute, 58 Second

There’s lots of newly-built housing, people are being laid off by the hundreds – yet places available for rent are extremely rare and costly

Dozens of Longyearbyen residents have scrambled to find housing on short notice during the past couple of months due to the destruction of 11 homes in the Dec. 19 avalanche and the 30 tenants at Gamle Sykehuset forced to suddenly evacuate their apartments last month. While most appear to have found at least temporary housing, the shortage has touched off a political feud about who’s responsible for the situation and how it should be addressed.

About Post Author

Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.

marksabbatini@yahoo.com

http://icepeople.net

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Read Time:2 Minute, 54 Second

It’s no surprise a political debate about “anchor babies” might get ugly but, as with so many things, Svalbard’s fighting it out like nowhere else.

Conservative politicians are enthusiastic about them. The left-leaning Labor Party is denouncing their counterparts for promising to seek changes in immigration laws that will never happen, perhaps winning a significant number of votes from foreign residents in last week’s election in the process.