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OK let's say the county obtains the land (without tyrannical theft like fake "condemnation"). It's then in public hands for a public purpose... to provide people with access to food and shelter by letting them create their own eco-villages. Every taxpayer has a vested interest in the benefit to be gained from this use of the land. The indirect and intangible benefits of providing this access are far greater than direct tangible benefits like federal reserve notes from monsanto.
Not to say there aren't a lot of issues to be resolved ... like how to collect property taxes from the eco-villagers.
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Irongstone - this all sounds great but if the county buys the land I'm not sure that translates to it being in the public hands. I'm not trying to put down what you suggest, but it doesn't sound realistic to me. I think others are saying the same thing - it's a fine idea but how do you make it happen?
Tom
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I have done some work with community groups establishing homeless programs, and there are good ideas here.
There is also the fact that there are many different paths to homelessness, and some people on these paths have many other issues that must be addressed before a tent-city / eco-village can assist them.
There are many visceral processes that impact on the homeless situation, the issues of under-lying illnesses for some, trust and abuse issues with others, alternative thought processes for others, education failures for others, along with the more visual processes, including monetary, employment opportunity and alienation issues..
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My radical solution is trailer parks popping up across America. Americans wouldn't be abandoning their homes voluntarily by walking away from their mortgage or involuntarily kicked out by the bank if they were not so darn aspirational. Folks like me still have a choice- either the sardine can or the cardboard box-
http://www.sunset.com/home/decorating/cr...page2.html
Other people want to make friends- I just want to make money.
James Cramer
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Protection and preservation of the land doesn't necessarily mean not using it. I thought the idea was to let people visit the areas and maybe even turn some of them into parks. Let's go back to our original motivation, like where CFB483 says "If I am living on this earth I am entitled to access to food and shelter...", and consider what are we each "entitled to". I would say we're each entitled to nothing more than a quiet place to exist with clean air, water, and soil, and some basic knowledge on obtaining food and shelter from that place. This does not include the right to alter the place in any non-trivial way such as with permanent structures or cement, invasive pests, obnoxious fumes, poison, noise, gmo's or other pollution, etc. Minimizing our footprint is what ecovillages are supposed to do.
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What could have been done differently to skate the inevitable mortgage crisis with the aftershocks today like fiscal deficits and rising homelessness? You can't be sure about anything. I'm sure a lot of home owners default on affordable housing- but would there still have been a housing bubble to burst if housing was more affordable for average Americans?
>>> would there still have been a housing bubble to burst if housing was more affordable to begin with?
Probably. It was the high demand for housing that drove the prices up, coupled with loans that let people buy when they couldn't afford to. People bought trailers who couldn't afford to as well as others buying upscale homes.
What could have been done to avert the mortgage crisis is regulation and oversight of the shadow banking and investment industry. It was the lending practices and securitization practices that caused the real problems, problems that caused credit to tighten, so that no one could get loans, so that there were hardly any qualified buyers, and supply went through the roof, and the market collapsed. Much more to it of course, but basically a bubble is driven by demand exceeding supply, and by optimism that prices will continue rising.
I recently read this excellent book called "Return of Depression Economics and the crisis of 2009" by Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman. Highly recommend it, easy for the non-economist like me to grasp. He says that this recession is not about failure on the supply side, but a collapse of the demand side. The more people tighten their belts, the worse it will get, so frugality isn't the answer; it just creates more unemployment. People need to consume, jobs need to be created, to break the cycle. He explains why in a Great Depression model of economics, conventional economic policies won't solve the crisis.
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I donno- seems like "consuming" is what got us in the hole. I don't see how consuming till you have zero credit going to improve the economy.
I followed the mortgage crisis on cnbc not closely I have to admit including this depressing doc-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11li6Iw4TeY
I watched it ... sad ...
how can not consuming possibly help the economy? Right now the foreclosure crisis is no longer being driven by bad loans; it's job loss. The demand for goods and services has dried up, so jobs disappear. There has to be spending that shores up employment in this country.
As for the lenders, they're foreclosing on the homes that have equity or nearly so, the homes where owners put a lot of cash into them, perhaps have been paying a mortgage for twenty years, but now job loss or medical or something has put the owner behind. That's the kind of house the lenders want.
The underwater homes that were bought with no down, the banks don't want them.
Economics is a complex beast. Wasn't my best subject in college. But it seems to come down to finding a balance between supply and demand, inflation and unemployment, and monetary policy has to be correct so that the balance of trade can be healthy. It's all just Monopoly money.
