German unemployed stronger than German entrepreneurs?

[Torsten]

The street our office is in, is about 200 meters long. As a matter of fact, you can't really call it a street since there is almost no traffic on it so it's a bit like a car-free zone. On one side of this "street", is a large office building which an underground car park the entry of which is at one end of the street. The block on our side of the street primarily hosts apartments and penthouses except for the ground floor on which offices are located.

Up until 2003, 100% of the newly built office space was empty. Then we moved into one of the small units. Next to us another company moved in together we are the only two businesses that are on this side of the "street". The other company was founded by two businessmen one whom is Russian. Over the years they grew into one of the largest (if not the largest) distributor of Russian language magazines, CD's, games, catalogues, etc. in Europe.

Since most of their books and magazines are printed in Russia, they frequently have to unload and load trucks and vans. Up until a couple of weeks ago, one side our street was open for cars while the other was blocked by removable blocks.

Some of the apartment owners (many of them are at home during the day) complained about the noise from the trucks and vans and applied at the city council to get both sides of the street blocked. Now every time a delivery truck or car wants to get to the doorstep of that Russian/German company, they have to call them first so somebody can come and remove the roadblocks. Isn't that great? The German bureaucracy has succeeded to slow down yet another company which has created more than 40 jobs within the past few years.

Do you have similar situations in your country?

TOEIC listening, photographs: Fast food in South America

[Jamie (K)]

Here is a comparable situation from the US, but worse:

A company builds a housing development near a farm. People move into those houses knowing perfectly well that there's a farm nearby, and being perfectly aware of what a farm can smell like. After a while, they start complain to the local government that they can't stand the smell of the farm. They may also claim that the farm poses some kind of danger to their children. The local authorities raise the farmer's property taxes to residential rates, he can't pay them, and he has to sell his land.

Sometimes he gets much more for the land than he bought it for, but he loses his farming business or has to move it. But in my opinion he shouldn't be forced out when residents suddenly decide that they don't like something that they knew was there when they bought their houses.