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weaselle · 6 years ago

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I got asked in my DMs to elaborate on my master project, so, just know if you click the read more, it’s gonna be like, a LONG ass read

(in b4: when I say things like “the poor” rest assured I am also “the poor” and not trying to feed into classist designations - I just need to be able to talk about different economic demographics. Also, I’ve pulled together several pieces of writing that cover this very involved endeavor for this ask, so there may occasionally be a slight overlap of information, tho I have tried to clean it up)

@victorylilygreen (lol, you asked) @ekinsellaauthor (idk I thought you might be interested)

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I have a plan to provide solutions to the socio-economic crisis facing this country. As I put this together over a couple of decades, it was important for me to not be telling people how they have to live, but rather provide them the tools they need to decide for themselves how to live. This plan then, is more like a mutable format, the first iteration of which provides the example and proof of concept. Then, when people see a successful solution available, they will be sure to copy it -- because this piece of social engineering is meant to be self replicating this way, I often refer to it as a socio-economic worm First, a breakdown of how I arrived at my plan:

The fundamental questions at the base of my attempts at large scale socio-economic fixes are:

1- Since every current system in our society is dysfunctional or corrupt, how can a single simple solution address the entire tangled web of institutions that effect every part of our human lives -- from agriculture, to rent, to wages, to government, to education, to the textile and clothing industry -- it's all problematic and needs to change.

2 - Since we can assume the wealthy will never help change the status quo, how can we get the middle class to pay the poor to create alternatives to current corrupt systems? in other words, how can we free time and money in the economy such that doctors and lawyers and computer techs can pay cashiers and gardeners and cooks to create banks and homes and grocery stores so we can bankrupt Wells Fargo and Century Real Estate and Whole Foods?

And the first answer is, we can create a simple solution that addresses all of it by bringing all that under one roof, for one small group of people, and addressing that microcosm in a way that is replicable by other small groups, as well as able to be scaled up such that it is applicable to the larger society.

To answer the second question, we have to create a situation where the poor are making more money than they currently do. And they need to do this by providing more of what the middle class need (for less money than the middle class currently spends on it) This will provide some immediate relief for the poor while freeing up money in the middle class to fund the larger solutions.

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Since we can't create money from nothing, one way to accomplish that is: instead of the poor making more money, the base concept of socio-economic organization of individuals has to change such that it lowers the cost of living for the poor. Lowering the cost of living accomplishes many of the same things as increasing wages. And we have to do that while engaging in providing more of what the middle class needs for less money that they currently pay.

Therefore, we need to identify what the middle class needs. A fundamental problem facing the middle class is that raising a family and running a household and earning enough money to pay for it all is a full time job for three to five adults, and they are trying to do it with two. Which is a major problem for the poor also. What the middle class is trying to do about it is what the poor cannot: buy themselves more time, literally. They pay someone to clean their house, they pay someone to watch their kids, they pay someone to maintain their garden, they pay for food that requires less and less time to prepare or they order to go food. They pay a dry cleaner or laundry service to wash their clothes. If they can afford enough of these things, they wind up with as much left to do as 2 people have time for.

The important thing to realize here is that these chores are the genesis of the necessary institutions that have become corrupt or dysfunctional. Everything a household or family needs is a microcosm of the larger industries and institutions. For example, paying someone to take care of your children is the seed of a school. Paying someone to prepare your meal is the seed of food industry - if you pay them enough to prepare you enough food, it becomes more cost effective to start producing the ingredients or getting them directly from the source. Paying an accountant to do your taxes or getting help with budgeting etc, grows into a bank. Paying someone to wash your clothes is the seed of the clothing industry - soon they can offer repairs, replacing buttons, fixing burst seams, from there alterations and tailoring follow... This is how the poor will be paid to grow new institutions to replace current problematic systems.

SO. Low-income workers need to organize into cooperative communities that leverage group dynamics to lower costs. If four families live together, they don't need to buy four toolbox sets, they can buy one and share. 10 families worth of food bought in bulk costs much less than 10 individual families buying food at the grocery store. Heating a single large building and splitting the bill is much more cost-effective than paying to heat individual housing units. And when one such group is shown to provide solutions and success, other groups will inevitably come together and copy it on their own, unprompted.

AND once they are organized this way, they should offer those services the middle class are trying to use as stop gaps - the chores the middle class are buying themselves out of. The best way to do this is buy creating the solutions to the chore/time crunch for their own community, and then selling those solutions to the middle class. In other words, someone needs to do the house cleaning, the laundry, the cooking, the gardening etc for the building they all live in, and then they can go on to sell that service to middle class households.

They need to do this for less money than the sum of those things currently costs, which can be accomplished via two techniques. The first is simply by bringing all those services under one roof. When the gardener and the housecleaner are arriving in the same company vehicle, the consumer is getting passed less in gas and vehicle maintenance costs, and so on.

The second way is to identify the one or two most needed, most expensive services, and find a way to lower costs for just those services significantly. Maybe something like babysitters that function as small, suburban neighborhood daycares during peak daycare hours, and the babysitters would fill the rest of their work week elsewhere in the company.

Now! We have the poor with a lower cost of living, providing relief services to the middle class in a way designed to grow into the new food production, the new clothing industry, new banks, new schools, new hospitals... and when you have all these things, you can make whole cities that are largely autonomous. Again the concept is to bring under one roof smaller versions of all the needed things in life that have become the large problematic systems that currently exist, giving citizens the real power to either force those institutions to change, or replace them. When you have new cities, they can demand or create much larger change in government, in power production, in raw material sourcing for things like lumber and fuel. And hey can be built on purpose, instead of the chaotic haphazard growth typical of current cities. If citizens want to live sustainable, socially progressive lifestyles, it behooves them to live in municipalities explicitly designed to facilitate that.

This is my solution.

It starts with a single building. A single community. I have planed the building and community, budgeted it, designed it to be able to grow into these larger solutions. I have started the procedure to create it, taken the first small steps.

step One A: Creative Suite (already working with a small team on this)

My plan is to run several big fundraisers over the next year and partner with an SF Bay Area municipality (probably Oakland) to open a public arts production center by converting a warehouse.

The purpose would be to have a creative recreation suite with communal equipment and spaces, such that, if you wanted, for example, to make a music demo, or do a pod cast, or make cooking videos for youtube, you could easily accomplish that using the space and equipment available in the arts production center. To include:

dance floor / props and body work space

music center / DJ booth and instruments

recording studio - both audio and visual, with lighting, green screen, mics, cameras sound proofing

singing booths - individual sized sound proof recording studios, wired with a mic and output

industrial kitchen - large fridge space, rangetop and large oven, utensils / tools, big counter top

painting studio - surfaces (not always canvas) paints, brushes, frames

Crafting studio - buy bulk discount from creative center for reuse in berkeley?

wood and metal shop - partner with a tool library? is it possible to get a recyclable high-density ceramic 3-D printer to print tools with?

electronic repair (and robotics?) center

stage / small theater space / workshop with attached makeup studio

sewing and costuming – sewing machines and cloth bolts etc

gaming center - table top rpgs, card games, board games etc outdoor component, pool table, anything we can get a good deal on

computer bank - about 5 computers for general use / e games

leave one/take one library, scattered 1-2 person writers nooks

garden center

Amazingly my estimates from initial research indicates I can put a cheap, functional version of this together for about twenty thousand dollars. In terms of installing this stuff in like, an otherwise un-refurbished warehouse. Even if I spend $35k, that’s like, a new car. Plus I want the first month or so of funding to run the place up front. That’s gonna be water, garbage (it’s a lot for the dumpster a place like this needs) a shitload of electricity, and 3 people’s worth of monthly salaries to start.

Then there’s the rent or lease, which runs about $2 per square foot in the SF Bay, and I’ll need at least 5 grand a month’s worth of space. Plus monthly supplies, for whatever deals on paint and stuff we can scrounge. That means the monthly operating costs are like $25k a month. Hence large fundraisers for the initial build out and first month’s operating. Plus you draw your initial arts center membership from the fundraiser attendees.

Which, I’ve thrown warehouse parties before, so I think I can hit a target of a couple hundred people at each party spending $35 apiece. There’s a trick to it – you keep the cover charge low or non-existent, and then provide a lot of opportunities to spend money inside, like games and food and stuff. Low or no charge to attend drives attendance up, and then you have more people spending money.

One key element is, you fill out the paperwork to be a catering company. Not only do you use this to sell food at the event, but ALSO it allows you to file for a single-use liquor license so you can have a bar. Usually there are a finite number of liquor licenses in a municipality, and they can go for millions of dollars. But with a catering company’s single event liquor license you can legally sell alcohol at the party. NOW we’re talking money.

anyway, I’m HOPING I can find state, federal, or municipal grants and assistance programs for the arts (and also, maybe some kind of, entrepreneurial support programs, but for like, small personal internet ventures?) Maybe even get some city to cut the rent in half by forgiving the property taxes on the warehouse or something. If I can’t, I may have to adjust the fundraising vs start date timing. Membership will be a monthly fee like a gym. I’d love for it to be free, and will certainly stay open to anything that allows that, but by the numbers it’ll have to be about $50 a month. Still, that’s like a 24 our fitness membership. One refill of gasoline. About one person’s share of an electricity bill. A phone payment. It’s a doable monthly bill for a lot of people. Monthly budget to be supplemented using the space, for example dance classes, ticketed theater performances, live band music shows, etc. So it’s possible we could drive membership prices way down. and maybe certain days or times could be free to the public or something. I want it to be accessible. Of the 3 monthly salaries mentioned above (each at $20 an hour) one is for me and that’s all I need, enough money to live on and access to this facility. There’s no way I can figure out how to afford this kind of creative suite for just me, but I might be able to figure out how to make one a whole bunch of us can afford This is just the first step of a very involved something I’ve been putting together since forever. But even if I only ever accomplish this first nesting-doll of a scheme, I’ll be very pleased.

The Creative Suite is like, an egg. And it should hatch into a little baby iteration of a socio-economic worm I’ve conceived.

If I can grow it to the full beast, it should become a self replicating, bottom-up revolutionary process that could improve the lives of many millions of people and put more power over our personal day to day lives back into the hands of the common public.

I have thousands of words in hundreds of research drafts and notes and exploratory essays, etc, but… Roughly speaking that looks like

flip the Creative Suite into MN Building One, a scheme designed to allow minimum wage workers to access more free time, lower their cost of living, and build equity by acquiring and owning their own property. Mortgage is paid off in ten years. Meanwhile

Building One starts up a business called Full Service Living that leverages group economics to allow for ethically sourcing goods while addressing the issue that middle class nuclear families with two adults face 4 full time adults’ worth of labor to maintain the household and raise the children.

Full Service Living becomes FSL Pro, in which the first group offers the next group of minimum wage workers their old building (cutting out the banks from the process) while acquiring a second building, gives the new people in Building One entry level jobs in FSL that pay better than minimum wage, while adding second tier careers to the mix living in Building Two – lawyers, accountants, mechanics, teachers, etc. These two groups continue to propagate more communities in their paired type one and type two buildings. Each of these community pairs contains the seeds for various institutions designed into them, and are meant to cooperatively grow into:

Community Support Centers. These offer a variety of support services to surrounding communities. Such as: day care and after school programs, tax and bill/budgeting assistance, legal advice/support. The sum of the total efforts by all parties is designed to blossom into:

A school A construction and landscaping company A public owned Credit Union/Bank A public service law office An ethical clothing line An alternative low footprint locally sourced supermarket I call Alt-mart (Alt-mart works hand in hand with a food production construct I have in mind. It’s a little involved for this breakdown)

All that with room for other endeavors people see a need for. The initial concept brings most issues of modern life under a single multi-family roof such that communities are afforded the opportunity and resources to create alternatives to the flawed or corrupt institutions with which we are currently participating.

When that all coalesces into networks of these communities and institutions, we’ll have all the necessary pieces to the puzzle and I hope a city will be built. I’ve designed many elements of it. Engineering as well as socio-political and economic design. But who knows if I’ll ever get there.

More detailed breakdown of the plan follows:

Project Overview and Concept Exploration:

Begins with providing affordable housing, property ownership, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers. Becomes a network of live/work facilities with a focus on sustainable entrepreneurialism, accessible autonomy, and community outreach.

These facilities function as socio-economic labs - they are on paper corporations, to access any advantages, protections, and loop-holes available to the corrupt institutions currently running the economy. They target the large corporations, ultimately seeking to end them. They produce businesses such as restaurants that grow all their own food, and doctors that are paid for by the apartment complex to provide medical care to residents.

Additionally, theses facilities provide a new way of life, in a format that allows for autonomy, but also allows for successful participation in the current economy... where all the money is.They also attempt to alleviate the time crunch problem for the middle class, wherein managing a household and raising a family is actually three or four full time jobs.

As such, the facilities are designed to grow into these large businesses/institutions:

SCHOOL

A preschool through junior college school on 3 cooperative campuses, wherein the school functions as a microcosm of the economy as a whole for the purpose of study: school gardens provide cafeteria food; school wood shops produce school furniture; economy classes figure out how the school budget can afford the water, fertilizer, metal, and wood.

3rd graders have classes in the garden learning the biome and doing the weeding; 8th graders are each growing 3ftX3ft gardens and helping in the large garden; 11th graders are cross-pollenating and designing green housing and aquaponic systems; bachelor students are splicing plant genes in the lab.

But by then some of the students have stopped being involved in the garden, and are making replacement hinges for all the school doors as metal shop homework or squeezing enough money out of the school budget for a big homecoming event.

By the third campus, students are living on site, so there is housing to manage. Student store and cafeteria provide economic interactions; the whole of our socio-economic society done small for study and practice, under a single administration instead of our current system of a scholastic career being broken up into mismatched administrations, which is a disservice to our students.

ALT-MART

A facility meant to compete with Target and Walmart and Whole Foods etc. It grows from the live/work facility kitchen and meal-plan set up. Alt-mart features a permanent farmer’s market, supplemented with an onsite garden/nursery. There is an onsite industrial kitchen and restaurant that uses overstock from the farmer’s market and ingredients from the garden, possibly purchasing all unsold produce from the farmer’s market at a discount.

The restaurant offers prepared foods for sale to the public, kitchen processes overstock into consumer goods like ketchup, frozen microwaveable breakfast burritos, and canned corn. Bakery also, of course. Facility also features a tool-library with a 3-d printer that can print any tools not on the shelves.

Additionally features local tailoring and a second hand clothing store. The local tailors get access to all the second-hand pieces for use in making their own clothes to sell onsite, as well as some facility-bought cloth and onsite machinery (sewing machines to textile machines like tuffters, gins, and looms).

Toy aisle is franken-toy land, where in-house creative DIYers take second hand toys and make whole new toys out of them. Electronics section is mostly repair, and offers lessons in repair. Book-nook and greeting card section features local/community writers. And so on. The goal is to offer an alternative to the big one-stop-shop stores, with a focus on local/community sourcing.

CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

This business grows out of building maintenance and groundskeeping into a landscaping company, then into a construction company. It should be the company used by the network of facilities for any renovations and repairs, so it should grow quite large.

COMMUNITY-OWNED CREDIT UNION (and LAW OFFICE)

Basically a non-profit bank, that offers community outreach for people who need help with budgeting, would like to learn about mortgages and homeownership, etc. Grows out of a Community Support Center that also offers community office space and legal advice.

FIRST STOP HOSPITAL

Not a full hospital, at least not at first, this should just be a few medical professionals that can answer common questions, provide emergency medical response, and assess medical conditions. Not for treatment so much as to find out what kind of treatment you need and who to get it from. Where first-time parents bring their babies when they’re not sure if they need o bring their baby to an emergency room. Honestly, medical care is the hardest part of this whole thing and I'm not sure if it's going to be possible or what to do about it.

CATERING AND EVENTS COMPANY

This is what get’s the ball rolling, the catering folds into the care-taking positions within the facilities, and the events company later become basically the arts entertainment and media/information division. There's a traveling circus element. It's fun.

These projects can possibly culminate in a whole large, sustainable city built from the ground up, that I have outlined. It involves building a large hill and two small lakes. I am happy to talk a lot more about that, but it clearly necessitates all the above pieces and more.

OKAY, so much for the overview. Let’s start at the beginning. The loan is for 2 million dollars, for a property of 1 million and another million in remodel costs.

Note: I ran the following numbers for California. Obviously property values and minimum wages are different other places, but the concept should still be applicable. Additionally, these are preliminary estimates only. Additional research and budgeting is required.

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First I have to tell you about a type of loan called “Micro debt”

Basically, if you loan 10 people a total of 100k, they are each responsible for 10k of debt. If one of them defaults, the other nine split their debt, so now each of them has about 11k of debt, which is payable as it is not a significant increase in debt per person. However, this also encourages them to all help make sure nobody defaults on the debt -- for example, if one person is in danger of defaulting because their car was totaled and they can’t get to work, there are nine other people with a vested interest in making sure that person gets access to a vehicle or ride share. If a person starts to default on payments because they are drinking all the time, there are nine other people who are going to drag the to AA meetings.

A couple of banks in Bangladesh and Germany have had success with this, citing a 98% repay rate which is a few percent better than the average home loan repay rate here in the United States. Additionally, there are at least a couple million people who have this structure of loan here in the states, so it's not unheard of nor untested, even specifically in our own economy.

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SO. 28 people get what is essentially a home loan for 2 million dollars. We'll call them group A. They each have about a $71,000 mortgage, their share of the loan. (note, an average mortgage in California is like, nearly half a million, so, less than a hundred thousand is a GOOD mortgage)

Group A buys property (ideally unused/abandoned industrial sites or dilapidated property in low income areas) for about a million, maybe a little under, and builds a facility on it for about a million, maybe a little over. (I looked at apartment building costs per square foot and reviewed properties currently for sale in California to get these numbers).

Some of the money is earmarked for partnering with the city on local infrastructure - so, say the streets in that neighborhood need repaving, we might buy all the materials for the city to do that, saving them money, incentivizing the city to work with us on rezoning and permits, while at the same time those kinds of improvements are an investment in the value of the property. This is because many of those buildings are not zoned as live-work the way this project requires, and rezoning without incentivizing the city to cooperate is a nightmare.

The facility is 60 bedrooms, with an industrial kitchen, plenty of diverse common space, and shared facilities (like at a gym: banks of private shower stalls, even a hot tub and a sauna, because if you’re going to ask people to give up single use showers in their own apartments, you want to add value).

Group A moves in and rents remaining rooms to an additional 28 people, we'll call them Group B.

Now, out of 60 rooms we have 56 people living in the facility. 10 of them are caretakers. Instead of paying money, they pay their way in labor, and they additionally receive a monthly stipend of 500 dollars a month to start. The caretakers do all the building maintenance and groundskeeping, they do the housekeeping and laundry, they make sure the bills are all paid, and they provide (cook) a meal plan. Utilities are all included in rent.

This means that anyone renting there has a single, affordable monthly bill for their cost of living, never has to cook, never has to do laundry or wash a dish. I call this Full Service Living. And the budget is for 60 but only 56 are planned in, with 4 slots available for social outreach, so this community can offer semi-temporary room and board for free to women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, homeless people with children, rehabilitated felons, whoever they want to help.

All this for a single payment of $1,000 per month, per paying resident.

Rent, food, utilities, housekeeping, everything. In an area where rent alone is more than that. This guarantees that a person making local minimum wage can afford to live, and pretty decently, with more free time and less headache.

When the building is paid off, if they want, Group A will each have a room to live in, plus a room to receive rent from, as income.

Let's break down the budget for this so far

(60 people, minus 10 caretakers and 4 outreach residents, equals 46 paying residents)

Per Month Costs to Paying Residents:

Meal plan for 60 people = $5,000.00

60 person phone plan = $1,800.00

Internet sufficient for a business: $400.00

Water bill for 60 people = $1,800.00

Electricity for 60 people = $3,600.00

Garbage bill for 60 people = $2,000.00

Caretaker stipend = $5,000.00

(subtotal: $19,600.00)

Building/Community fund = $1,853.002

million dollar mortgage = $21,213.00

Property tax = $3,334.00

Total: $46,000.00= $1,000 per paying resident per month, roughly $600 “room” and $400 “board” with as many costs of living as possible paid as one low bill.

Sharing a room adds a "board" payment to the room, so if you move a romantic partner in with you and split it evenly, you each pay $700. I also have discount rate breakdowns for people with children in various scenarios, but it starts to get complicated for what is supposed to be a simple overview. Basically it comes down to an inherent flexibility in the meal plan; the fact that a food budget for 60 people easily accommodates an extra mouth to feed could allow a group to offer a single parent a separate room for their child with no board payment, so they could live in two rooms for $1,500; stuff like that.

At those payments, the building is paid off in ten years. TEN. Our low income earners don't have to wait 30 years to be actual property owners, and they only have to give the bank an added $500k instead of the 1.4 million a 30 year mortgage would net.

Here is one place people replicating the format and participating in their own group can do whatever they want. The 28 building shareholders have the option of leaving everything the same but owning the place outright, which means they are no longer paying the ~$500 mortgage portion of their bills, instead each receiving about $500 in rent from the other residents, which is a net gain of $1k per month each in disposable income. Or they could all just sell the building and split the money 28 ways. Or they could all move out and use the entire building to generate residual income. Anything is good, we've made almost 30 people property owners and built them equity for only minimum wage while they provided relief services to the surrounding community, so anything they think is best, we've already done it good.

Ideally they move into a second building and sell the first building to group B, which is what the very first group will have to do to complete the seeding of the entire project.

SO. The two buildings I mention represent two stages of the greater project. Full Service Living, and Full Service Living Professional (hereafter FSL, and FSL Pro)

In the first stage, you have 10 caretakers providing full service living to 46 paying individuals, most of whom make minimum wage, and 4 social outreach recipients. FSL is basically getting as much of your life as possible handled with a single low bill, something similar to living in a good hotel.

To expand, The caretakers additionally seek to offer this service to middle class households - these homes already hire a house cleaner, a gardener, use a dry-cleaner, order delivery food, so they are prime clients. As middle class households become clients, the caretakers need more people to handle the work load, and the other people living in the facility quit their minimum wage jobs and work for the FSL company. This will earn the group profits as a whole while paying the individuals close to $25 an hour. THIS allows the second building to be much nicer.

With a second, much nicer building, the 28 people move in, and they find 28 new renters from higher up the economic food chain. These folks need to earn at least 35k a year and include people from a specific list of professions. This new group of 28 shall be referred to hereafter as the tenants.

The rent agreement is unique: The 28 tenants pay about 2k per month each for the same package, the FSL company from the first building provides all the housekeeping, meal plan, etc. The tenants also agree to pay one third of any increase in their wages, up to a cap, with the money going toward renovations, improvements, and additional services and amenities. This means as your income increases, you pay more actual dollars, but a smaller percentage of your over all income

So if you are making 35k you earn 3k a month, which means you pay 2/3 of your income to the facility (many people spend this much on rent plus food). If you double your income, you now earn 6k per month. Your rent package would go up by 1/3 of your additional income, or one thousand dollars, and you would still have an extra two thousand dollars per month of personal discretionary income. You would have started out paying 2/3 of your income, but now you’d be paying only 1/2 your income. Your building improves, your life improves, but you’ll always be able to afford it, and every raise you get does give you more spending money. Additionally, the staff is motivated to really give you all the support they can, as a well supported individual is more likely to have monetary success.

And one more important thing. Tenants either pay an additional 500 bucks a month in money, OR they offer $500 of their professional services to residents of the facility. Unclaimed time must be made available to the surrounding public for free.

So, say a paralegal values her time at $50 dollars an hour for qualified legal advice (such as, do I need a lawyer for this? what kind of lawyer do I need? What is this legal process going to look like?). The 50 residents only use an hour this month, so something like 9 appointments should be made available to the surrounding community for free - the facility staff will handle outreach (letting the community know of the offer via flyers etc). They will handle making the appointments according to her availability, and will provide the facility’s communal office space to hold them in.

These programs allow businesses to grow in a very low risk environment. Let’s look at a day care worker. She’s a classroom assistant at a day care, going to school part time to finish her teaching degree. She offers residents hours of baby sitting as her $500 service. As she earns more money, the facility also earns more money, and can renovate a space that sometimes functions as a play room for kids. No longer going to school, she is earning more money, the facility hires a permanent babysitter or two, and she manages them. Free to residents, they accept neighborhood kids for a reasonable fee. Low cost good quality day care becomes available to the neighborhood. She’s a class lead at a good school now, making more money, so the facility can afford to hire classroom assistants and the baby-sitting / daycare starts offering after-school programs to older children, well on its way to being a small private school, with our tenant running it.

Similarly, restaurants and construction companies grow out of offering facility residents goods and services.

To recap the ideal situation here: 28 people live in a nice 60 bedroom facility. They own a business in a neighboring facility, which houses workers who are paid fairly, but who also pay the first group monthly on a ten year lease (instead of paying a bank) -- after which that second group owns the building they live in and no longer has to pay. Everyone’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, are all done for them. By now their meals are largely made from the facility’s garden and aquaponics greenhouse, which includes a fish-farming pool, a few goats, a cow or two, and some chickens and ducks. Living with them in the facility is their lawyer, their nurse, their electronics expert, etc. They’re all part owners in their own non-profit bank/credit union, and there is an onsite day care, gym, and communal workshop. The group offers outreach programs to the surrounding community: low cost high quality day care, legal advice. They provide semi-temporary room and board to those in need, such as women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, and the homeless (especially those with children). They are an active part of an ongoing socio-economic program designed to give low-income housing, property ownership, retirement options, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers, as well as alternatives to broken institutions to all.

By the time they pay off the second building’s mortgage, the first building has been paid for over again, and THAT group can move into a ANOTHER FSL Pro building, offering their new building to a new round of pro tenants while offering that first building to a THIRD round of low income workers.

The first 28 people achieve all of this, building ownership, business proprietorship, community support, within the same thirty years it takes to pay off a standard home loan, starting with nothing more than entry level jobs and this master plan.

From there, growth continues. More buildings are offered to more low income earners. More facilities means more services, amenities, cooperative power, a stronger micro-economy. Political influence also increases with membership...

Eventually, you can take all these businesses and facility/communities, and go build a whole city, which looks a little like this

See the problem with cities is they grew organically. No one ever sat down and said “we know we want a hundred thousand people to live here -- what is the best design for that?” Instead is was just, some people, and then some more people, and then some more...

So.

You go out in the middle of wherever. You dig two GIANT holes. You take the dirt from the holes and you build a nice big hill. You fill the holes with water and you have two lakes. Now you have a nice place people want to live, nestled between the lakes, under the hill. It gives you enough water and topography to create a resource feedback loop and control things like wind and sun exposure.

You regulate everything for sustainability, design it from the ground up.

Current municipalities have to provide everything for the public from a budget that largely comes from property tax, which is 2% of the property value. That’s why when there’s something like a homelessness problem, there is no money to address it properly.

This city holds all the property in a trust administered by the elected city officials. Instead of rent paid to private landlords, the public leases their homes and businesses directly from the city, which keeps rents low and controlled and gives the city an incredibly large budget compared to current municipalities, which allows them to provide outstanding public services -- transportation, healthcare, parks -- as well as giving them enough budget to address any issues like homelessness. Regulation and organization for sustainability as a whole city addresses the fact that existence is always interlocked issues. For example:

Grey water. In this city, only approved cleansers are allowed for sale or use (and the city provides one. Because the city provides it, it has to be cheap and easy, which means that there is always room for improvement, or, a business selling better cleansers for more money. But no one will ever go without one available, even if they are broke). SO, no bleach down the drain. So you can take the grey water of the city, and dump it on the top of the hill into a manmade creek/river, which starts full of rocks, then pebbles, then sand (a natural filtration process) flows down the hill and ends up in the first lake, which is recreational. The second lake sits a little lower, and the water flows into it from the first lake. In the second lake there are fish farming and bi-valve farming, which additionally filters the water (especially bi-valves like fresh water muscles, which feed by straining the water through organic filters and not-for-food populations should be in the first lake as well). The city pulls its water from the second lake through its combination water purification facility / power plant. The power plant uses a steam turbine already so we simply run that steam through a charcoal filter, and re-condense it into molecularly clean water for municipal use; this uses our existing power generator, instead of requiring massive amounts of additional power.

That’s just one example. The city has it’s own sustainable agriculture program, and grows it’s own food. There are public meal plans, and a lot of organization of the city economy that I just don’t have the energy to get into here.

These designs allow a large group of people to live with very little environmental impact. It would be healthier for the citizens. And it would encourage a certain amount of political unity, while removing a lot of stress from modern life.

The city is modular in growth. So when the city population doubles, roughly half of them build a city nearby and live there.

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Aside from the first two facilities (and then probably the first of the cities, if that happens) I don't need or want to be involved. As it replicates into more and more facilities, the baseline should remain: "here is a format by which minimum wage workers can own property and grow wealth in a way that allows them more control over their lives and denies profits to existing corrupt industries and corporations -- copy it if you want and suit it to your own group of residents”

I don't want to tell people how to live or what to do, I want to give them tools and templates to improve their own lives, whatever that looks like to them.

Anyway, believe it or not, this is only about a tenth of the detail I’ve put into this. I can never get the whole picture of any of this out in one go, but I've spent a lot of time on all the details which, as you can tell, are innumerable. The ways in which the FSL buildings act as entrepreneurial incubators by cutting start-up overhead to nearly zero while providing an initial customer base of 60 regulars, the various permutations that could address specific scenarios, the details of how to add gardens and fish and food production supplemented by ethical food sourcing.. I could just. keep. going. forever.

It addresses the whole tangled set of problems. You have to help high population areas, but also go out to the middle of the country. You have to help low income earners and people in poverty, but also our middle class is struggling. You have to do things that effect education, infrastructure, ocean management, industrialized food production, population density/overcrowding issues, helps prevent homelessness, creates better jobs for workers of big box stores while providing affordable more sustainable alternatives to their customers...

I think this plan does all that and more.

I’m exhausted and can’t find all my work on this right now, it’s buried in email chains and computer back ups, but I think I more or less encapsulated it. Good night

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