“My ideas become more real when I share them.”
The State of Things in 2022 (for People That Have to Work for a Living)
Hi, my name is Alex Wagner. I work in Web 3, doing community and content full-time for a DAO tooling company.
I have an idea for a DAO that I think will actually help people, by creating a model for groups to purchase land, and build community-owned housing.
First, let’s examine why it’s needed.
Things Are Getting Worse
If you have a pulse, and don’t live in a cave, you are probably aware that things are getting worse for the average American.
Most of us must sell our labor in order to survive, to eat food, and pay for housing.
I will admit, I am luckier than a lot of people. I have a great job, and I live in a city that has a lot to offer. My only complaints are that my apartment doesn’t have a washer and dryer, and it’s right next to the trashcans(alarm clock courtesy of the super sorting the trash at 7:30am), but at least it’s affordable-ish, and it’s rent-stabilized.
Privilege-admission-time. I have definitely benefitted from being a straight, white male, who grew up in a middle-class family and attended some college, before dropping out.
Still, I spend much of my waking hours worrying about the future, often to the point where I spend the whole weekend laying on my couch, wondering what’s the point of doing anything if we’re all fucked.
Here’s a few reasons why I have been spending the majority of my free time for the last few months in a frozen state of panic.
Exhibit A: Housing is getting more expensive.
According to a Zillow study, in 2021, home value growth exceeded median income in 25 of 38 major metros.
That means that just by owning a house, you could’ve made more than your yearly salary, if you were of the median income in your city.
Why is this bad? Because a lot of us rent–we do not own homes. When housing prices raise this rapidly, it makes home ownership even less accessible for the people that work for a living. The study shows that “annual rent payments grew by more than $3,000, while down payments increased by more than $10,000”.
A $3,000 yearly rent increase averages out to about $250 per month. Now imagine your rent increasing that much every year, because it is entirely possible. Reasons include developers and the US government not building new housing to keep pace with demand, and Wall Street buying up to a third of available starter homes in major metropolitan markets.
Other telling statistics include “median existing-home sale price”.
Here’s a graph showing how dire the housing supply situation is.
Who’s going to stop greedy landlords and developers? Politicians?
Ha.
Media outlets report on a potential housing bubble, but speculative capital has everything to gain by forcing millennials and zoomers to become lifetime renters.
The housing market is in crisis in the U.S., and it’s only going to get worse.
Exhibit B: Food is getting more expensive.
In the United States, the food-at-home(read: food from the grocery store) Consumer Price Index increased 8.6% over the last year, from February 2021 to February 2022.
Supply chain disruptions from the Russia-Ukraine War, and a two-years-plus pandemic are to blame.
It’s clear that food is rapidly increasing in price, as well. Not good.
Exhibits C + D + E: Our democracy is failing + cataclysmic climate change will intensify
If things like the January 6th riots at the Capitol, supply chain issues, and Federal and State governments’ abysmal response to covid aren’t bad enough, we have climate change to deal with, which will impact the country in a variety of ways, many hard to predict.
Additionally, nearly half of all Americans report delaying medical care because they cannot afford it.
This Vice report predicts societal collapse by 2040.
Does this sound extreme? I suppose it does. It’s Vice after all. Society probably won’t collapse per se by 2040, but who knows.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the America’s societal fabric is decaying, rapidly so. Our government is not doing its part to fulfill the social contract.
We pay income tax and expect affordable housing, healthcare, and jobs that pay a living wage. For the past 20 years, we have received less and less.
Our government is asleep at the wheel, and speculative capital is exploiting this, with the end result being that the average person’s standard of living is declining significantly.
Do I sound like Bernie Sanders here? If so, great.
In that vein, let me continue with my message:
Instead of worrying and hoping for that our government somehow grows a conscience, I believe that we must be proactive, buy land, and build resiliency together.
Politicians are not coming to save us.
We have every incentive, both good and bad, to become self-reliant in the coming years.
The Good:
- if you own land, landlords can’t raise rent.
- Growing your own food is a key component of autonomy and self-reliance.
- Owning land allows for freedoms that apartment living and HOAs do not.
The Bad:
- All that stuff I listed above (exhibits A-E), plus the all of the things we can’t predict in the future(ie how the supply chain is affected by geopolitics, climate disasters, pandemics, etc).
- State of unrest. The inevitable right-wing militias and roving gangs.
The United States government can’t even create affordable housing or regulate fair prices for medical care. Do we really believe Federal, State, or local governments will provide adequate support for natural and man-made disasters?
If Covid has been any indication, well…no.
Climate disasters will become more common in the future, meaning that not only will we have more of them, but they will occur at increased rate. We are assured more floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, power outages, etc. These disasters will be especially devastating for those of low socioeconomic status, because they lack the resources to survive and navigate climate disasters.
So, what can one do, being faced with rising rent prices, rising food prices, rising medical care costs, civil unrest, and impending climate disasters?
Let’s Buy Some Land
I see buying land as the only rational response to what is happening in America right now.
I’ve mentioned this to a few friends, and even shown them early drafts of this article. I haven’t necessarily pitched anyone, yet.
But I also don’t want to wait. I want to buy land now.
My plan is: buy land, live off-grid, and begin to invite people up.
Probably in a yurt like this.
I expect this to be pretty lonely at first, which leads me to my pitch.
I want to share this land.
I want to co-own it, co-govern it, co-steward it.
And I plan on creating a DAO to do that. Please consider this post to be my proposal, or at least the first draft of it.
I my vision is to share this land with friends and family, and other like-minds who share the same vision. I want to share it with the previous indigenous inhabitants of the land.
I want the land to be a place where people can go to live cheaply and autonomously, where they can come and simply live, without having to worry every day about how they are going to make ends meet.
What Is Autonomy?
The definition of autonomy is, in a word, independence. It is also defined as a “self-governing state, community, or group”.
In this case, I use the word autonomy to mean that the inhabitants of Acorn(what I’m calling this “land project”, for now) will be able to manage and guide themselves without the meddling of landlords, homeowners associations, intolerant neighbors, and so on.
For instance, is it fair that a landlord requires first, last, and security to move into a shoddy, overpriced apartment? In NYC, we have to pay a broker’s fee of one month’s rent to boot!
I often wonder, “How did things get this bad?”
Autonomy means cutting out the middlemen, in this case the landlord, the real estate broker, and even the courts(!). Ideally, through the DAO we will create our own rules for governance. That’s on-chain governance, baby 😎
Acorn will be the first land project of Earthseed DAO. There, all inhabitants will take part in the governance and stewardship of the land. All inhabitants of Earthseed DAO will benefit from transparent, fair voting and dispute resolution processes.
To me, Autonomy(with a capital ‘A’) means independence from the various leeches that control and profit off of the things that should be a human right, things like housing, medical care, and education.
Earthseed DAO is an experiment to create fair and equitable housing that is managed by an engaged, diverse, and aligned community.
Earthseed DAO Is For The Children (and Other Non-Crypto Native People)
I’m experimenting with different ways of framing it, but another way to think about Earthseed DAO is that it will be a container to bring together interested parties to live on and steward the land. I will use the term ‘we’ throughout the rest of this post, and those hypothetical interested parties (and myself) will be the ‘we’ to whom I’m referring.
For those new to DAOs and Web 3(I’m toying with the idea of publishing these blog on Medium/Substack), you can think of Earthseed DAO as a co-op of sorts, but instead of using clunky, slow, and archaic legal structures, it will use code to automate administrative tasks, manage the treasury, and track the decision-making of the DAO.
Co-ops and DAOs each have their pros and cons. As this project evolves, we will try and find the best balance between the two. For instance, maybe the land is best run as a community land trust + a DAO to administer the proposal process, voting, and tokenomics of the DAO.
But I also want Earthseed DAO to people who believe in the vision and aren’t necessarily “crypto-native”.
I realize that I’m publishing this on Mirror, and that if you’re reading this there, you probably know what a DAO is. If you already know DAOs, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs.
However, I’m also writing this for the average working person who might be interested in joining an experiment like this. I’m writing this post for someone who is likely just as frustrated and worried as I am, and seeks to have more stability, resiliency, and freedom for themselves and their families.
For those that don’t know what a DAO is, it’s basically an “internet community with a bank account”. Instead of setting up a formal structure, such as a subdivision, or a community land trust, we can use the land so that it is cheaper and decision-making is easier and more effective for everyone.
For Earthseed DAO, I seek to create a community that can onboard anyone who wants to join who is not crypto-native. We need to have rails so that non-crypto natives can join, and live on the land and be part of the community.
My Prediction for Acorn: Year One
As I imagine how the first land project, Acorn, might happen, I predict that I will end up buying some land somewhere, probably by the time I’ve written 10-20 of these posts, if I can maintain my “two posts per month" goal. I will be the sole owner of the land at first, and I will start doing the work of building community–of inviting friends, and friends of friends, and random people I meet at the farmer’s market, and random people that I talk to on the internet.
What I’m saying is that instead of doing the typical DAO thing of building a community in Discord, or selling NFTs, or selling a token first, I’m instead going to go ahead and buy the land and then see who interested in being a part of the project to co-own and co-steward the land. I discuss this in greater depth in the “Plan A” section below.
I suppose it might be more strategic to go the “normal” DAO route of creating community and raising funds first, but time is of the essence, and housing, land, building materials and labor are not getting any cheaper.
Why Is This Called Earthseed DAO, btw?
Oh yeah, and I’m calling it Earthseed DAO because I’m a huge fan of Octavia Butler’s work, and her Earthseed series in particular.
To explain ‘why’ deserves a post in itself. For now, I’ll just say that I see her works as prophetic, and her Earthseed philosophy seems like a good set of principles for building resiliency in an era of uncertainty and strife.
Plan A: Buy the land first, and then create a DAO to share the governance and stewardship of it.
How This Might Work
First off, I’ll admit that I’m actually less concerned about the DAO part. I’m not in any rush to create an ERC-20 token, figure out how to tie governance to stewardship of the land(as opposed to ownership), or even setting up a Discord server.
If there’s any response to this post, I’m open to discussing it. However, I don’t need to do start a DAO to buy the land, which to me, is the first order of business.
I’m way more interested in publishing my research with regards to finding and securing land, and fostering conversations with those who might be interested in contributing to Earthseed DAO, or living on the land, than trying to do a “raise”, at least at this early stage of the project.
The DAO part comes in when other people want to co-own the land. Also, I should state explicitly that this first land project will be a pilot for creating other communally-owned land projects across the country, and maybe even the world. With Earthseed DAO, the goal is to create a set of repeatable processes for a group of people to buy and co-own a plot of land, and to run it communally, leveraging Web 3 governance processes and technology.
So, DAO notwithstanding, here’s my plan for securing some land, and making it available for people to live on for the pilot project of Earthseed DAO, Acorn.
How I Will Buy Some Land
I’ve been looking at land on Zillow, and I’ve come to the conclusion, at least in terms of protection from climate-based natural disasters, the upper Northeastern United States is the best place to buy land.
We’ve seen wildfires, earthquakes, and civil unrest wreak havoc on Western coastal states. We have regressive, fascist state governments taking power in the Southeastern United States, not to mention hurricanes and flooding. There’s tornadoes in the Midwest, and the same repressive political trends, plus supply chain and energy infrastructure issues like those in Texas.
Basically, the row of states from South Dakota to Maine look to me to be the best, in terms of mitigating natural disasters, civil unrest, and avoiding governments that are passing laws that make abortion illegal and terrorize trans children.
Also, these states, being historically underpopulated (with the exception of Massachusetts, possibly), have lots of available land, and more available subsidies for homesteaders.
I will admit, I could be wrong here. In this list of the “10 best states for homesteaders”, only Maine was included in the list. The rest were mostly Midwestern states, with the exception of Oregon.
Oregon is going to be on fire for the next decade though. What listicles like this article don’t take into account is how the climate is changing. For instance, New York City became a sub-tropical climate zone in the last few years, because of climate change.
If we take a look at the image above, from a recent New York Times story, we can see that extreme heat, extreme drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and hurricanes are going to cause what is likely to be trillions of dollars of damage(my guesstimate–change my mind, liberal) to homes in the United States in the coming decades.
As the climate continues to change(for the worse, if I really need to make that clear), states like Vermont, Maine, Michigan, and even Upper New York State are going to be the best places to be, even with state income tax rates of 4.25%(Michigan) to 8.75%(Vermont, yikes). The extreme rainfall of the Northeastern U.S. seems entirely preferable to the other options.
Having proximity to large bodies of water and the Canadian border are major perks as well.
So, all that to say that I’m looking at Vermont, New York State, Maine, and Massachusetts for land.
Western Maine is probably where land is cheapest and most abundant, but I don’t know anyone there. I have a few friends scattered around the Albany/Southern Vermont/Western Massachusetts area, so I’m starting to look there.
A Potential Site
To give you an idea of what land looks like in this part of the country, here’s a listing that caught my eye–91.12 acres in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Hampshire Country is the same county where Smith College, UMass Amherst, and Hampshire College exist. The land might be more expensive than you might find in Western Maine, or Arkansas, but at least we won’t be completely surrounded by Trump country.
Now, I don’t have $180,000. I don’t have even close to that amount in my savings.
However, I do qualify for a USDA loan in Hampshire County, at least on paper.
If you don’t know anything about USDA loans, they are a 0% down, fixed 30-year residential loan given out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The purpose of these loans is to help people start farms and/or bring economic development to rural areas of the country.
It takes time to file for a USDA loan, and many property sellers prefer to deal with buyers who can put down a significant amount of cash for a down payment, often 20% or more.
I’d rather not do that, for two reasons: a) it will take me at least a couple of years to save $40,000, and b) I’d rather conserve that capital to build infrastructure and dwellings on the land.
For these reasons, I’m going to go the USDA loan route, and hope I find a seller that is willing to work with me.
Ok, But How Is This Model Replicable?
Honestly? I don’t have a good answer for you.
In my wildest dreams, I’m hoping that Earthseed DAO becomes the “Paypal Mafia” of Web 3, but instead of optimizing for profits, we optimize for co-ownership of land and property, and fighting for policy and regulating that creates affordable housing in the United States, and maybe even across the world.
I am hoping that, by working through the complex problem of “how do we co-own land together and build housing on it via a DAO?”, we figure out what works, and are able to source additional capital to buy more land, and create additional land projects.
On-chain real estate is a very interesting aspect of Web 3. We’ve seen CityDAO working on this problem on a much larger scale, although it seems like they are still figuring it out, and have yet to build anything.
I created this “DAO Stack” diagram
In Closing
So that’s Plan A–buy the land first, and then create a DAO to share the governance and stewardship of it. Once I’ve purchased the land, I intend to either camp or put up a prefabricated building and live on the land for 6-9 months out of the year. I’d invite others to come up and do the same.
Hopefully, county officials wouldn’t try to shut us down. If they did, we’d just figure out how to work around it, or to get the necessary infrastructure or licensing in place. I think it’s safe to assume one could camp indefinitely on land that they own, but there are always surprises when it comes to this sort of thing.
“So, essentially, you’re going to buy the land, kinda-sorta primitive camp as you find the money to build structures and basically wing it–and you’re hoping that other people will want to come up there to wing it with you?”
Yes! That’s about where I’m at right now.
Maybe you think this is a bad plan, and that there is a much better way to do this. If so, let me know! My dms are open.
Currently, there is no Plan B. A possible Plan B might be figuring out a fundraising structure(maybe NFTs or doing a token sale), and either putting a down payment on the land, or buying it outright.
I plan to write 100 posts over the next two years. Right now, I don’t really have anything else going on–I don’t have a family, I’m not responsible for taking care of anyone–so this project is kind of my baby. In fact, you could say that this project is my attempt to create some sort of ad hoc family and to build a community that takes care of each other.
I’m writing these posts as a way to sanity check my thinking, and connect with like-minds. Hell, I may even receive feedback about a much smarter way to start and run a communal land project, Web 3 or no Web 3.
Anyway, yeah, 100 posts. The number is arbitrary, but also nice and round. I think that to attract a community it is going to take a couple of years. My intent is for these posts to act as a heartbeat or a beacon for people who have been thinking about these things(community, autonomy, self-sufficiency) as well.
Earthseed DAO, is an attempt to create a utopia, while knowing that utopias are inherently flawed, and by nature, cannot last.
I learned this firsthand when I lived at The Abode of the Message, a Sufi retreat center in New Lebanon, NY from 2018-2019.
I miss my time there. I loved “living in community”.
I loved eating most of my meals with others in our dining hall, doing weekly “karma yoga” by working in the kitchen or on the grounds, and all of the chance encounters that happened from living on the same property with 30 other people, whether it was an impromptu game of whiffleball, or just sitting on the front lawn watching the sun set.
My time at the Abode ultimately ended abruptly, as the administration evicted me, and most of the other full-time residents there because they were old and scared of the community at the Abode having a say. I suppose this experience may have influenced my desire to own land. In the future, I’ll write a post about my time there.
Given the opportunity, I would much rather live on some land that I own with my friends, where we dance and grow our own food, than to spend another year living in a city, isolated and alienated, subject to the increasing prices of literally everything.
I’d rather try to do that, and have it be imperfect, challenging, even messy, than just sit around praying for the world to change.
To me, it’s a no brainer. I hope others see it this way too.
Thanks for reading, more to come.
Alex