I tweeted a thing recently about "hey, maybe owning a house is a really
good idea... especially in times like these":
SVS (for those who know him) replied with "why not rent a house?"
I think I've largely come to a conclusion on this one. I think these
are three distinct categories.
1. Homelessness
We currently live in a hotel / guest house. It's fine. We've taken two
rooms so we can be on conference calls without murdering each other. We
happened to be on the way to a new apartment when the lockdown happened
so I actually have a computer monitor and keyboard with me. Things are
tolerable.
However, it's been nearly two years of homelessness prior to this. No
fixed address. This is a really uncomfortable position to be in. I'm
only starting to acknowledge now what a toll it takes on a person,
mentally. It's a bad system -- and surprisingly expensive.
2. A Home.
A home could be either a rented space (usually apartments) or an owned
space. But I've come to see why at least one owned space is much, much
more valuable. Our "home" provides us with connectivity to our closest
friends, the city or village or community we want to be a part of, and
the infrastructure we depend on regularly. I won't talk to much about
the idea of "a home" since I think we all know what it is, even if it's
a bit liquid.
3. Home Base
Home base might also be the same as Home. But it doesn't have to be.
"Home base" during our college years was (and for many of us, still is)
our parents' house. Early in life, "home base" is "home-home" ... our
real home. As the years go on, our real home becomes the place we
identify as "home" (#2) but it's pretty easy to get into a position
where we're either homeless (#1) or have a home (#2) but do NOT have a
real home base.
I think "home base" is important. If the city became unsafe, it's where
you would go in precisely this kind of global catastrophe. "Home base"
has few expenses because it's owned property, not rented. "Home base"
has friends or colleagues or acquaintances or neighbours of all of
these to keep an eye on it while we're away. "Home base" is a good
place to store our junk since we all have things we want to keep but
don't necessarily want to keep __with us__ in our current home (#2).
Home base, because it's owned property, is probably somewhere outside
of the city. The city is noisy, dirty, and expensive. The city is a
place for a home (#2) not a home base (#3). It's probably somewhere we
can get to easily. Somewhere we could go to relax, think, work, or
decompress for a weekend or a summer.
Making home base cheaper and cheaper might be a peripheral goal of
owning a home base... or it might be the primary goal. Your home base
could be a retirement home or a farm house, in which case "really
cheap" might not be topping your list of priorities. My current home
base is an off-grid cabin with no running water or grid electricity. It
sits pretty hard on the "inconvenient but darn cheap" side of this
equation.
"Cheap" comes with some side benefits. Genuinely cheap property has no
ongoing expenses beyond the bare legal requirements... but it also
pushes a household or community toward independence. In the case of the
4440 cabin, that's our yearly land tax. No property tax. No utilities.
No vehicle licenses. The cabin is dependent on petroleum for cooking
but not for transportation or heating the building. It's dependent on
the grocery store for milk but not for carrots.
Localizing "home base" for a few people could mean economies of scale
push some of this independence further than it would otherwise work for
individual- or family-sized installs. A community garden or a small
farm is a very manageable (and common) method of local food production.
Community-sized energy storage is easier (and often cheaper) than
trying to get a couple of Tesla PowerWalls into every home.
Energy and food are obvious cases but we can pick almost anything. It
wouldn't take a very large community to set up some studio spaces: a
dance/yoga/karate/etc studio space would benefit even a relatively
small community. An acoustically-dampened recording studio might be the
project of only a few community members but access to that sort of
thing is a lot more appealing than shelling out the kind of money
required to get access to a professional recording space in an urban
environment.
Home base is a great place to hide during a pandemic.
Home base is also a great place to store my tractor and mechs.
Home base is where I will build my pizza oven.
Maybe home base has a hot tub.
Or a climbing wall.
Hopefully it has fibre internet.
love,
-steven
Steven Deobald