Different cultures have always approached land use and ownership in different ways. There have been nomadic cultures, feudal cultures, and capitalist cultures all over the world. From the three field system of the middle ages to the rise of the urban metropolis in the age of refrigeration, land use and its accompanying standards for a citizens living requirements has shifted dramatically over time. From the many Native American tribes who had no cultural recognition of land ownership to our modern model that recognizes someone as the owner of a home even if they have no actual equity in that home, there have been a wide variety of systems to learn and choose from.
So what is the technosocialist approach to real estate and land use? Let’s start at the level of Material Rights: we’ve already covered in a previous essay the fact that every citizen deserves the right to somewhere they are allowed to exist. And it is important for citizens to have the security of knowing that they will not be forced to move arbitrarily, because moving one’s place of residence is an extremely disruptive process. At the same time, private ownership of land can create enormous social complications. For one thing, as a fixed resource it tends to quickly become very expensive. In the past few years in the United States we have seen the consequences of inflated housing prices upon the economy as a whole and individuals in particular. Consumers have been forced deeply into debt in order to afford a place to live, and the instability of an economy based on that debt has caused a massive crash in the larger economy.
Long term debt is something that technosocialism does its best to avoid. Flexibility of citizens to make, reevaluate, and remake their own choices is key to the operation of a free market, and just as it should be as easy as possible for people to change jobs, it should be as easy as possible for people to change their place of residence. Having a large part of their net worth tied up in real estate makes that very difficult. With that in mind, I have something extremely strange to propose: private ownership of houses, but not of land.
Your first reaction is probably one of complete confusion. After all, until the invention of hoverhouses, you can’t have houses without land, and houses are generally quite tied to the land they are built on in a very literal sense. But there are some significant differences between houses and land as concepts. A house is an object. They are built by humans, and more can be made as needed. Land, on the other hand, is not an object. It is space. It can be altered by humans, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Sea can be turned into dry land through the use of landfill, but that is simply a type of alteration. Barring the discovery of methods of manipulating the fabric of space itself, there is no way that anyone could actually create more space. As a fixed resource therefore, it is considerably more reasonable to treat land as something which is publicly owned.
Now, as to the link between houses and land. Our western culture ceased to be nomadic more than a millenium ago, and as such we tend to think of living space as something that remains stationary. In American suburban culture, we have gone as far as to accustom ourselves to large single family homes even when we only need a fraction of the space the house contains. But there is a growing movement against that trend that advocates the use of so-called “tiny houses” instead. A tiny house is generally between 60 and 300 square feet, and they are often built on top of trailers. Unlike motor homes, these tiny houses are intended for traditional single-location use, but the choice to build them on a trailer makes it possible for the owners to relocate them when they need to, which is extremely difficult to do with larger houses.
Our current society looks at two basic housing paradigms: renting and ownership. My concept leaves renting more or less intact, because there should always be public housing available to citizens that they can occupy without long term commitments, and for this they would have a variable charge added to their Consumption score depending on the demand for their particular housing unit relative to the housing units in least demand. (see essay on Material Rights for more details.) The big change comes in the concept of home ownership.
Humans have a very strong terretorial instinct, and people tend to feel far more secure when they know that they own their home and have rights over their own personal “dominion”. Similarly, people tend to keep up their property better when it is their own rather than one they are simply leasing. I would not dream of doing away with the institution of home ownership altogether. But I do think that it could use significant tweaking.
The biggest tweak is that I would separate ownership of the house itself from the land that it sits on. A citizen can absolutely own a house, but they cannot own the land that it stands on. In other words, they can pay a one-time Consumption charge for a house and then live in it without any further charges for the house, but they will be subject to a periodic charge for use of the attached land based on the demand for land in that area.
There are several key differences in how this would affect citizens looking for semi-permanent living situations. Under our current system, the house and the land must be purchased simultaneously. This tends to be extremely expensive. Building a house generally only costs between $5000 (for a tiny house like those described earlier) and $100,000 (for a large suburban house) in terms of actual building materials and elementary labor. What makes the same house that was built for $100,000 “worth” $450,000 is the location of the land that it sits on. Whether it’s in a good school district, whether it has a nice view, etc. By separating the two, we can make the house itself much cheaper to purchase.
Before I go over the rest of the way that home ownership works under technosocialism, let me take a moment to go over some details about rent. Whether a citizen is renting a dwelling or renting land that accompanies a house that they own, all citizens who are not living in strictly Material Rights housing are going to be paying rent of one sort or another. In our current culture, we tend to associate rent with wasted money, and with insecurity. After all, you might love your apartment but if the landlord doubles the rent when you need to renew your lease, you will probably have to move.
Technosocialism attempts to prevent that. Because all citizens will be in situations where their rent is likely to shift over time as demand for housing in their area rises or falls, it is important for them not to feel insecurity about possible rising rents. To this end, there needs to be a restriction added to the rent determination algorythm that prevents a citizens rent from rising more than 2% in a given year. Whether it be on an apartment or simply a plot of land under their house, people need to feel secure in their ability to stay in their home. On the other hand, if demand dramatically lowers in their area and rents would be due to fall, they should do so immediately and without restriction. This deliberate imbalance in making it easier for rents to fall than for them to rise should hopefully counteract the tendency for rents to rise constantly as the population increases and becomes increasingly urbanized.
Now, back to home ownership. Let’s take a look at George, who has gotten tired of only showing up in examples when something needs to have plans drawn up, and has decided to purchase a house. Being a fairly simple guy, he is buying a medium-sized tiny house on a trailer. There are a number of such houses available, so he is able to purchase it at the base Market price of 10,000Csv. It is a significant hit to his ratio, but thanks to the residual Contribution from his various engineering projects, it is one that he can easily afford. Once taking ownership he has painted it, moved in all of his stuff, and done all of the other little things that people do to make a house their own. Now he simply needs to decide where to put it. He has a variety of options.
Those who have portable houses have the option of taking their housing Material Rights in the form of low-demand land that they will not be charged rent for. In this case, they will generally have to choose from the least popular locations in the area, and they will not be allocated much more than the land directly beneath their house. But, just as citizens have the right to somewhere to exist, so do houses, and it should always be an available option. From there, those with movable houses can upgrade in several ways, by expanding the amount of land they hold in addition to that directly below their house, by moving their house to a more desireable location, or a combination of both.
In George’s case, he has always wanted to have an outdoor patio, so he simply asks the system to recommend an 18′x12′ plot where he can put his 10′x10′ house, and the system shows him locations with at least that much space available, along with the current Market rent value for those properties. He finds one on the outskirts of town that looks promising, and after going to visit it in person a few times, he signs up for it on the Market. Because it is a very small plot and it is not in a high-demand area, he will only be charged 25Csv in rent for that property.
There are two key things that I would like to point out from George’s story. The first is that he was able to purchase his house first and find a location for it second. This is obviously something that can only be done with moveable houses, but it adds a fantastic element of flexibility to the market for citizens who do not want to have to compromise their standards in building quality or design simply to get the view that they want or vice versa. Secondly, George was able to specify exactly how much land he wanted to use. He was not bound by existing plot lines, or any sort of government regulation. If he decided later that he wanted to expand his patio and wanted another 100 square feet of land, he could use the Land section of the Market to expand his property borders into any adjoining vacant space he wanted to, and his rent would be adusted accordingly. If there was no nearby vacant space, he could put in a bid whenever a lot opened up near him, or he could choose a different location entirely.
Now, let’s take a look at Bill and his Real Estate situation. He’s a man who’s not afraid to raise his Consumption score to get what he wants, and his various business ventures give him the flexibility to do that. Bill has a fairly large stationary house close to town where he lives with his family. He likes his kids to have enough space to run around and play catch, and so he has rented the two acres surrounding his house to act as a yard. He had the entire cost of his house charged to his Consumption when he bought it, so the only ongoing cost he has is for the land. The trick here is that he is not the only one living there. His spouse and two young children live there as well. How is appropriate Consumption charge established?
The household consists of four people, two of them children. Each of those four people would be entitled to a 6′x8′ boarding room or a 10′x10′ plot of land according to their Material Rights. As we covered in the essay on children, children are not able to have anything significant charged to their Consumption scores until they gain economic adulthood, but they are entitled to their Material Rights. Therefore the total cost of the land would be calculated based on demand in the area, and then the cost of four 10′x10′ plots would be subtracted from that. The net Consumption charge is then divided evenly between the two adults, although if one of them has a higher Contribution score and therefore would like to take on a higher percentage of the cost, they can set that up when the reserve the land.
But let’s say that Bill and his family grew wanted to move. How is that handled if he owns the house but not the land? One common problem today is that those who have ended up with unmanageable mortgage payments cannot move to somewhere cheaper without selling the house to someone else for at least the same price. This adds a rediculous restriction of movement to citizens lives. It is true that because Bill chose a stationary house he cannot simply bring it with him to a different piece of land. But as soon as he puts the house on the Market and establishes his residency somewhere else, the rent charges for the land around the house stop. The land surrounding the house becomes available for anyone else to claim, and the land directly under the house is made available to the new owners of the house. He will not get any Contribution credit for the house until someone else purchases it through the Market, but neither will he be subject to any ongoing charges for it.
On to Steve. Steve lives in an 8×8′ movable house on a 10′x10′ lot in a fairly run-down part of town, which he claims on the basis of Material Rights and thus pays no rent for. He built the house himself mostly out of scraps and recycled material, and thus managed to get himself a fairly nice dwelling for around 500Csv, which he had charged to his Consumption score when he bought it. But now that he’s been working regularly for the last few years and he’s built up a comfortable buffer in his ratio, he wants to take some time off to get some serious songwriting done. He’s tired of the distractions of the city and wants to try country life for a while. Luckily, he’s in a moveable house so that part won’t be a problem. All he has to do is rent a truck to tow it. But what are his options for finding property out in the country? He has several.
To start with, he could attach himself to a rural work settlement. There are a number of things that society needs to do that are best done in a rural setting. He could bring his house out to an established living space near a farm, lumber camp, or other outpost. Depending on the supply and demand at the post for both labor and living space, he would probably be able to pay any rent that accrued through working at the post. The main advantage of this method would be the connection that would exist between the outpost and the rest of the society, enabling him to still enjoy many of the conveniences of society (mail, internet access, etc) while living rurally. On the other hand, if he is looking for the opportunity to get away from the pressures of other people, he may find that to be too crowded a solution.
Another option would be to find a purely vacation-oriented site. It seems likely that society would have chosen at some point to set up camping sites in nearby scenic areas, which would be accessible by truck and might have water and electricity hookups for moveable houses. The rent for this type of site would vary considerably based on demand, but it would be a nice way to get out of the city for a week or two without significant cost.
Or, as a more permanent solution, he could try a homesteading site. These would be quite isolated from society, and he would be responsible for either bringing or finding his own food, water, heat, etc. without being able to rely on any of society’s resources. Depending on Steve’s personality, this could be a positive or a negative factor in his decision, but one nice thing is that this independence from the rest of society would lead to practically non-existent Consumption, which would probably outweigh any rent that he needed to pay for the land.
Then there’s Fred. As we’ve seen before, Fred is quite dedicated to the goal of keeping his Consumption score as low as possible. To that end, Fred moved into a 6′x8′ boarding room in a somewhat dilapidated neighborhood in the city many years ago and he has stayed there ever since. He has never had any Consumption charges for lodging. Fred moved in at about the same time a number of other artists did, and since then the neighborhood has experienced considerable gentrification. The small artist boarding rooms such as the one Fred occupies are now in considerable demand from yuppies who like to pretend that they are more creative than they actually are. The last time a room in Fred’s building went on the Market, it went for several hundred Csv a month. So how much will Fred be charged for staying in his suddenly-more-valuable room? Nothing. As we discussed before, rent for land or for apartment space can only go up 2% a year. So when Fred moved into a room that at that point qualified as part of his Material Rights, the base price locked in was 0. And no matter how many years 0 increases by 2%, it will always remain 0.
The one disadvantage that Fred has to deal with in his tiny room is the fact that as an artist, he sometimes needs a workspace bigger than his room. While he has a small sewing area in his room, he does not generally have enough space to lay out and cut fabric for projects. To do this, he saves up space-intensive projects and then rents out a workroom in his building. This is where it comes in handy that he’s in a building with a lot of artists. Rather than every individual person having a large workspace in their apartment which is likely to go unused much of the time and tends to get filled up with clutter (yes, I’m speaking from experience as an artist here,) Fred can live in a very small space and then simply get the use of a room for a day or two when he needs it. These communal workrooms would include large tables, sinks, etc.. Different workrooms might cater to different specialties, so that there could be woodshops with collections of tools, fabric shops with large cutting mats, and painting shops with easels and good windows in addition to general-use large rooms that could also be used for meetings and parties. These rooms would be available for rent in the same basic way as land, although for much shorter durations. The Consumption charge would be based on demand for rooms of that type in the area, and those wishing to reserve a such a workroom would be able to do it in increments as short as 30 minutes.
That about covers the basics of how housing and real estate are used by the public, but how about how they are built in the first place? Real Estate development is a major industry in our current United States, and finding a way to replace the current corporatized system is an important step in making Technosocialism viable. Once we have eliminated the ability to buy up and subdivide land, we have significantly shaken the usual development process, so what do we put in its place? Apartment buildings are constructed largely through the Civic Proposal system. When demand for housing reaches a certain level, plans can be proposed for new apartment buildings that would then be approved and carried out much like the bridge or the ear swab factory mentioned eariler. As for the building of houses, moveable houses can be manufactured and sold through the market just like any other product. Stationary houses, with their relatively permanent committment to use of that land as a residential property, should be built only when a particular citizen wishes to do so. That citizen is then responsible for either building it himself, in which case he is only charged Consumption for the raw materials, or for hiring laborers through the SNA system, in which case both materials and labor will be charged to his Consumption score.
The quality of all such houses is very important. One probem with the current way the Real Estate market works is that the incentive is for developers to take empty land and fill it with houses. There is very little incentive for those houses to be well-built because none of the other houses in the area are well-built and soundness in building is something that many modern suburb dwellers have been trained out of looking for. As we mentioned in the Manufacturing essay, the manufacturing process has two basic stages: process design and actual production. Thus when maintenence needs to be done on a house, part of that maintenance process is determining whether it is simply standard maintenance or whether it was due to a flaw in construction. If it is found to be a construction flaw, the cost of the maintenance is charged not to the Consumption score of the owner of the house, but to whoever was responsible for the flaw. For example, in the development where I am currently living, nearly all of our neighbors have had to have their windows replaced because the initial window installation was so shoddy. Replacing a broken window would be standard maintenance, but replacing a badly installed window is fixing a construction flaw, and under the system I’m proposing, the cost of that replacement would have been billed either to the installer who made the error, if it was the fault of a single laborer, or to the designer who specified the installation process, if it was a systemic problem.
The key is to make sure that whenever there is gain to be had in doing something properly, that does not incentivize people to do it badly but in great quantity. One of my aims for societal change in technosocialism is a shift to valuing quality over quantity, and that can only be done by penalizing for bad quality. I’ll go over this in more detail later, but it seemed apropro to mention it here.
Before I close the essay, I want to mention one more thing. Readers may have noticed that I have talked about urban and rural living situations, but not described any suburbs of Imaginary City. This is quite intentional. Part of it is a strong personal dislike for suburbs. But part of it is also due to the significant social disadvantages that come from suburban settings. Suburbs are very inefficient use of land, with everyone having a quarter acre of land and needing to go several miles to find a contiguous piece of open space big enough for a pickup baseball game. They lack both the convenience of the city and the charm of the country. They more or less necessitate the use of a motor vehicle for everything from commuting to work to buying a gallon of milk. The personal car is something I have tried to make as unusual as possible in my technosocialist model, and part of reducing our reliance on cars is reducing our reliance on the suburb. My hope is that by giving citizens more control over how much land they reserve with their dwelling rather than confining them to predefined lots, we can make people more aware of the social costs involved in our current ticky-tack-house-on-a-quarter-acre standard and incentivize them towards more efficient living.