[P2P-F] Paracity Article

[Eric Hunting]

"Everybody will own it" is actually a possibility depending on the organization. The Paracity article notes the intention to create a kind of centralized organization for the community that manages the infrastructure and the superstructure while leaving the particulars of human-scale retrofit habitation to inhabitants. Presumably, this organization is going to be the primary land holder in some form and primary interface to the larger city bureaucracy. This could be as simple as a sort of loft apartment or trailer park model or employ a more distributed ownership model. These details haven't been covered yet on Marco's blog so we're speculating here, but there is a model I know of that could potentially suit. It's a concept I've long proposed as the basis of large intentional communities, particularly such things as marine and space settlements. It's a concept called a Community Investment Corporation or Land Home Bank.

Some here may recall one of Buckminster's Fuller's most ambitious project proposals; the Old Man River City project. Intended as an economic stimulus project for chronically troubled Mississippi, the (probably far too) ambitious plan called for the creation of a vast domed city that would provide modern housing for the region's poor as well as economic opportunity. Key to the plan was an equally ambitious real estate development concept devised by Fuller's colleague economist Louis Kelso. Kelso was the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Program once popular among technology corporations. But what is less well known is that this concept was just one small part of a larger economic development scheme Kelso called the Just Third Way of economics that was intended to repurpose the conventional mechanisms of Capitalism toward the purpose of systematically expanding public ownership in the nation's industrial and economic infrastructure and thus establish an equitable social share in national productivity and the dividends of progressing technology. Key elements of this system were, on the national scale, a program called the Capital Homesteading Act--a kind of national mutual fund intended to develop a Basic Income--and on the corporate level the ESOP and CSOP, or Consumer Stock Ownership Program. On the community level there was the Community Investment Corporation, used as a mechanism of socially equitable real estate development, particularly in the context of disadvantaged communities.

Basically, the CIC is like a condominium corporation expanded to cover an entire town, city, or region. Started by a government land grant, the CIC owns and develops all the property in the community but is, in turn, owned through shares by all the residents of the community. When you move into this community you don't buy land. You buy shares of the CIC which equate to an option on the use a certain amount and type of property as available--hence the alternate term Land Home Bank; a kind of bank or credit union for property. You can trade available space anywhere in the community as you like. When you leave the community you can sell the shares back to it or to others. The advantage of this system is that it gives you largely the same kind of potential for household wealth-building as owning property but with much less risk. The CIC doesn't just develop homes. It does all sorts of commercial development like any normal community. So the stock one acquires when buying-in grows value and generates dividends like any other corporate stock, according to the productivity in the community. But being a stockholder rather than a land holder means you enjoy a share in the collective growth and productivity of the whole community rather than relying on the vicissitudes of one little lot somewhere. And this helps avoid the kind of racist and classist NIMBYism that so plagues American communities. Your property's value isn't keyed to what's happening immediately around it. It's keyed to the whole community. It doesn't matter who your neighbors are or what sort of house they choose to build. Imagine if buying an apartment in New York or San Francisco earned you a dividend on, well, damn-near everything. This also gives communities a powerful mechanism for uplifting the poor. Being based on a land grant intended for this, in Old Man River City it was planned to provide loans of shares for housing secured by their own dividends, based on the premise that simply living in a community means you are in some way contributing to its economy and productivity. This could provide great security for people who might not have consistent employment while allowing them a means to build wealth toward retirement. Also, the CIC might employ ESOPs and CSOPs for its workers and leased space tenants, allowing people to earn stock in the community they might eventually exercise an option for a home on. 

Now you may have already guessed why I was interested in this model for such things as sea and space settlements. Those kinds of structures can't do real estate in the silly manner we commonly do it today. These things are arcologies by definition. Necessarily unified macrostructures. You simply can't treat the space in a habitat on Mars as some mass of permanent private parcels when a collective maintenance process must be maintained and, at any time, it may be necessary to move people and change the structure. Such changes may be frequent and often be a matter of life or death for everyone. You can't have knuckleheads grandstanding about their property rights or trying to exploit a situation. With a CIC you can maintain the necessary ability to compel people to move without causing them any economic loss. It may be a hassle if they have to move from one place to another in the settlement, but they haven't lost any present or future equity. That equity is keyed to the settlement as a whole, not any one space in it. And they can have their immediate pick of any other available space on-demand without having to deal with a market. If you design to anticipate such change, the hassle of it can be greatly minimized. 

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com



On Mar 17, 2014, at 10:14 AM, Patrick Anderson wrote:

> Who will own the land under the structure, and the structure itself?
> 
> How will that property ownership change as people move in and out?
> 
> Does anyone here sincerely believe it doesn't matter, or that we can use a blurry, overly simplified approach such as saying "nobody will own it", or "everybody will own it"?
> 
> We must design a meaningful strategy to address the intricacies of how property ownership must 'flow' across time, otherwise this project is very likely doomed to failure, just as nearly every other well-intended Intentional Community.
> 
> Patrick Anderson
> http://CrossCrowdPredictiveProduction.github.io