The Localist Manifesto
section 5
controlled demolition, starting with “real estate”
When that moment comes, Robin 99 needs to be ready. Preparedness in the early stages will likely be hard-won. Habits are hard to break and Americans are deeply habituated to politics as usual, even as they are repeatedly betrayed by the candidates they vote for. These voters are clearly dissatisfied, but their hopes for something better remain tethered to a party system that routinely coughs up a foul mixture of boot-licking opportunists and shameless grifters, each one ready with one scapegoat or another to divert attention from the real causes of discontent. Robin 99 offers something those voters have never had – a genuine alternative to party politicians and to party politics generally. Our campaign appeals to this same multitude of restive citizens with a program that goes straight to the heart of their fears and frustrations – their now total lack of control over the institutions that determine their prospects and well-being. It may be slow going at first but as more and more festivals occur and word spreads in media channels, it is doubtful that Robin 99 will remain in the shadows for long. The election that sees her vote count approach, say, 10% of the total will signal a turning point in the campaign. At that point, the realization that this could actually happen will become a material force in the world – a big, beautiful upwelling of mass democratic initiative with enough substance to alter the course of events. When that happens, Occupy the Hearth Day will emerge from the mists of speculation and take shape, on the near horizon, as a distinct possibility.
We should think carefully about what it will mean to take possession of our homes. Most immediately, this occupation will provoke a loud eruption of joy, rich with spiritual overtones. The hearth brings the individual into communion, simultaneously, with the comforts of the moment and with characters and events from the past. It is where family and friends tell old stories, share spirits, and submit with animal contentment to the warmth of fire and the savor of food. It is a place for wonder and self-reflection, a place to rest weary bones and mend frayed relationships. On Occupy the Hearth Day, the right to shelter and to the pleasures that come with it will become inalienable. No more of the anxiety that descends when keeping a roof over your head becomes a matter of uncertainty. No more keeping a job that you hate because you will lose your house or your health benefits if you quit. And, we might expect, a lot less of the self-loathing – on display when we eat or drink more than is good for us, or when we lash out in anger at loved ones or strangers for no good reason – that invariably gets acted out by a people burdened from day to day, year in and year out, by these kinds of gut-level worries and indignities.
Occupy the Hearth Day will bring about the collapse – all at once and for good – of the real estate industry. The crisis that ensues, however, will be of a different sort than the one we experienced over a decade ago. That crisis was precipitated by unscrupulous money-grubbing on the part of high rollers within the industry, but its effects were felt by ordinary people outside it. After the whole Ponzi scheme unraveled, the 1% did not agonize over choices about where to educate their children or when to retire. They did not fear losing their homes or going to jail. All the suffering and sacrificing occurred in the ranks of the 99%. By contrast, we will confront the new circumstances that emerge in the aftermath of Occupy the Hearth Day with an unprecedented, and powerful, advantage: at the very outset of this crisis, we will have been relieved of the biggest monthly payout that most families make – the rent or mortgage payment. This circumstance will lessen dramatically the negative effects felt by ordinary people when a major industry collapses. Those effects will accumulate instead where they properly belong – in the laps of the speculators. The whole business of turning people’s need for shelter into an opportunity for profiteering will vanish overnight. So too will the very idea of “real estate” – an abstraction whose prestige derives from our willingness to believe that a fundamentally parasitic activity is in fact an essential service. Clear our heads of that belief and we find ourselves suddenly in the company of real things – sandstone, peat, and sage; plains, basins, and watersheds. Sever our attachment to real estate and we can reestablish our connection to land as it presents itself to us and as we need to get reacquainted with it if we are to preserve its capacity to support life.
The dying away of real estate will create new opportunities for us to live as we please with people who share our vision of the good life. If you prefer locally-owned businesses to corporate chains, if you would like a neighborhood friendly to walkers and bikers and horses rather than automobiles, if you want a lifestyle compatible with renewable sources of energy and local sources of food – well, just find other people who want to live in the same way and make it happen. Folks who want no part of this kind of lifestyle could seek out people who share their ideas and create neighborhoods to their own liking. With no market in real estate and thus no market values to factor into your calculations, people could just trade house-for-house or apartment-for-apartment, depending upon which region and what kind of community they want to inhabit. A housing exchange would spring up on the internet; moving would become as easy as finding a willing trading partner in the region or neighborhood to which you hope to move. The alternative-minded will be willing to sacrifice square feet and grid-fueled amenities for the things they value. Anyone whose vision of the good life still includes cars everywhere, lots of square feet, and closet-sized refrigerators could “trade up” to get out of a neighborhood headed, from their perspective, in a hippie-ish direction. Many hybrid varieties of local living, each featuring a different proportion of alternative and conventional practices, would take shape. The end result would be a healthy proliferation of lifestyles – a multiplication of choices arising from preferences felt and negotiated at the grassroots. In such a setting, alternative visions – more locally grounded and ecologically attuned – would find room to took root and expand. That, after all, is how growing numbers of us would choose to live if opportunities for doing so were at hand. And this could all be achieved without any governmental authority legislating this or mandating that. Like the right to assembly or uncensored speech, the achievement of the right to shelter would lead to a tangible expansion of freedom. By making that right inalienable, we reduce the amount of time spent doing things we are compelled to do by economic necessity and increase the time available for activities we choose to do because we find them pleasing.
A controlled demolition is not a sudden catastrophe. It is something we plan for carefully and, after that plan succeeds, celebrate warmly. The real estate industry makes nothing. It transfers decision-making power from community inhabitants to absentee speculators. It preys on ordinary people using financial gimmicks that do their damage before anyone who is not a speculator can figure out what is going on. The plundering of local communities will continue for as long as we remain content to wait passively for the kind of crisis wherein we take the hit and the perpetrators are bailed out. We must – actively, on our own timetable, and in a spirit of defiant localism – take the fight to them. Robin 99’s manner of redistributing wealth (our manner, as localists) makes proposals to raise the inheritance tax or the minimum wage look like child’s play. All the money paid out over the course of a lifetime to banks and landlords would be available for other purposes. All the work done to come up with that money month-after-month and year-after-year would no longer be necessary. Resources and energy alike could be channeled into activities that bring the only kind of enrichment worthy of the name – of our hearts and minds as free individuals and of our local communities as arenas of self-governance, instruments of ecological stewardship, and guarantors of well-being.
As an act of political will, the abolition of real estate will provide the cushion we will need to ease the transition to a society where decisions about how to use land and what to do with buildings will no longer be made by people who are motivated by financial gain. Those decisions will become the province of neighborhood governing bodies. The people who actually occupy a piece of land will decide together how they intend to use it. Whatever development is to occur will be dictated by local needs and native preferences rather than by the needs and preferences of banks and corporations whose interest in our place does not extend beyond the amount of money they can drain out of it. Instead of more over-built, energy-sucking malls and superstores filled with shoddy merchandise made by impoverished workers in the Third World, we can orchestrate a renaissance of small, family- or cooperatively-owned businesses, set amid as many parks, gardens, orchards, commons, wild places, bike paths, walkways, and horse trails as we decide are conducive to good health and easy sociability, producing goods that reveal something of who we are as a locality and what we imagine we are good at or find particularly useful or appealing. Nowhere is the venality of the current system more palpable than in the hymns sung by politicians from both parties during every election cycle to the “independent entrepreneur:” the destruction of small businesses, and small farms in particular, has gone on unabated since the dawn of the twentieth century. Since the last world war this process of economic concentration has accelerated to the point where huge banks and corporations control nearly every economic asset and make every decision about how those assets are to be used. No Democrat or Republican will ever reverse this process, but Robin 99 will – as soon as we give him (claim for ourselves) the power to do it.
Occupy the Hearth 