Justin Boland’s latest mad scheme:
The City of Detroit has such an absurdly bad depression on home prices that you can currently buy an apartment building for less than $1000. To begin with, hop on Realtor.com and take a look around Detroit.
Rather than abandoning Detroit, should we be embracing this opportunity to start over? Is there a proven track record of using sustainable development and ecosystem design to raise property values? Are there factories that could be transformed into carbon sinks, community supported farms, bioremediation projects and public parks? Are there blocks that could benefit from permaculture installations?
I disagree with comment about first collecting standards and practices then starting franchises. The way to make these things work isn’t to get everyone to sign-on to one single experiment in one location. It’s to get a lot of concurrent experiments going and sharing information. Not everyone can move to Detroit or is willing to. Other alternatives suggested include Baffalo, NY and St. Louis, MO. I’d have to add Yakima, WA to the list as well.
Also, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. Here are people to learn from or team up with:
Bolozone and CAMP in St. Louis. (More on Bolozone)
Ithica Hours, a starting point for looking at Ithica in general.
And of course Justin’s other project Vermontistan, which has some overlap with Second Vermont Republic.
December 22, 2008 at 4:59 am
Actually, I’ll be using the Vermontistan page to mock the Second Vermont Republic pretty regularly….it’s run by a lawyer from Georgia who wants to lead a movement of “anger and fear.” Not very Vermont.