Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [201]
In the current paradigm, a town or city seeking low-cost housing faces borrowing stupendous sums of money and a raft of complex restrictions to build new "affordable housing" which ironically ends up costing a fortune.
In the model of leveraging existing capital, assets, skills and solutions, then the city inventories abandoned properties, checks which are delinquent in taxes and notifies the owners (or the last known owner) to pay up/fix up their "public nuisance" property.
If the owners do not respond within 30 days (or if ownership has been so muddied by mortgage-backed securities, foreclosures and other financial complexities that ownership is no longer claimed unambiguously) then the city acquires the properties via eminent domain and auctions the properties off to anyone who contractually agrees to restore the property to habitability. (If they fail to do so, they forfeit the property.)
The total cost of increasing the available housing in this manner is a mere fraction of the costly "build and maintain housing" model. This approach leverages the existing assets and solutions at low cost to the community government's taxpayers.
Indeed, many cities with shrinking populations and far-flung housing are acquiring and then dismantling housing in just this fashion, as a means of shrinking their boundaries to manageable urban cores.
When money was essentially free--redistributed and/or printed by a Central State--then solutions could be costly because insiders had a windfall to exploit. Once the State largesse is gone, low-cost leveraged solutions will be seen as "idea windfalls" which can be exploited at very low cash costs.
Placing alternative solutions in the public domain via the Web before the implosion of the status quo is of paramount importance.
As detailed above, reforming the status quo is fundamentally impossible, just as its devolution and implosion are inevitable. But the process of reaching a new understanding is not instantaneous; new perspectives the solutions need to be presented and discussed long before the devolution spins into insolvency. Like seeds, they must be distributed into fertile ground before any harvest is possible.
The key understanding here is that the process of transformation requires a certain length of time--the process of anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance and hope--and the last step, hope, needs practical solutions grounded on an integrated understanding of the problems.
Since structural reform at the national level is essentially impossible for the reasons outlined earlier, then the fundamental alternative solution is to bypass or diffuse concentrations of capital and power via transparent non-privileged parallel structures and parallel informal power structures--what might be called small-scale counter-government.
One goal of every community should be to offer purpose to those willing to work.
As described in previous chapters, paying work will be in short supply, but unpaid work will be plentiful. People need purpose and meaningful work. The loss of purpose and meaning is as devastating as the loss of a livelihood, and the over-arching goal of every community, however small, should be to provide purpose and the opportunity to participate by leveraging existing organizations: citizens watch committees, farmers markets, building co-ops, churches and church-based groups, city parks foundations, volunteer-based animal shelters, etc., and encourage the establishment of new transparent, non-privileged organizations formed around specific interests and purposes.
Such civic groups already have an organization set up to manage volunteers; there is no need for a costly (and thus unsustainable) new bureaucracy.
The Internet is an essential "utility" for self-organizing networks and communities, transparency, reciprocity, trade and citizen engagement.
Cities and towns would be well-served by making the Internet available (via a tax