Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: peer to peer lending club for Cohousing?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Sep 25, 2015, at 11:56 AM, Chris ScottHanson <cscotthanson [at] mac.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> I think a Cohousing Savings and Loan is just what we need.

Everyone may have heard this story but I’ll repeat it. The way Chinese 
immigrants in NYC got their businesses started was to pool their money and fund 
one of them to start the first business. Then the money when to the second one, 
etc.

I don’t know the details but it obviously worked. (It may have helped to have a 
Mafia to enforce it.)

The Vietnamese and Koreans formed a network in the 1960s-1970s to support each 
other in the small markets all over Manhattan. They were open 24 hours a day 
and some people slept while others prepared food. At 3 in the morning someone 
would be out on the sidewalk peeling carrots. They carry everything you would 
need in an emergency, like toilet paper, to fresh vegetables, a salad bar if 
they are large enough, hot coffee, etc. They even traded 100 pennies for 
dollars when the banks started charging stores to get change. They weighed 
them. 

Organization and commitment focused on earning money, increasing their capital. 
As much as money is maligned, it is also an in common means of exchange that 
works as well as any other. Bartering is another form of capital exchange.

A book group at Takoma Village just finished Piketty’s "Capital in the 21st 
Century.” Picketty anaylizes the problems in the capitalist system and suggests 
a solution. It isn’t to abolish capitalism but to establish an equal playing 
ground. Skipping past the details, the answer is to have a “capital correction” 
on those with huge amounts of capital. The top 1% that is hogging it and a 
global reporting system so capital can’t be hidden. 

Capital is “extra money.” It’s money that is used only to make more money. Some 
people are taking it all because they started out with more. Think Monopoly and 
you start with twice or ten times as much money as everyone else. Piketty 
explains it with numbers and a 300-year history so economists will believe him. 
The next time you play Monopoly, try it this way and you will see what happens 
very quickly. And how the player with the most capital also has to release just 
enough money to keep other players in the game and hoping they will eventually 
catch up.

If you can see the documentary Rosenwald, he built hundreds of schools for 
African American children across the South and South East by funding a program 
in which he gave an amount of money that the community had to match, and 
required the community to build their own schools. He also provided a design 
that they could build and that was energy efficient — South facing, for 
example. It was one of the first housing movements to do that. But then the 
school was a community responsibility. It wasn’t subsidized.

That’s the kind of thinking I’m talking about. In our economy, looking for 
subsidies and “hand ups” is good but I don’t think institutionalizing them has 
worked well, except on a personal basis. Not even in cohousing. 

I also agree that using housing as a wealth builder in the sense of making 
money off it is economically sound as some of the housing busts have 
demonstrated. But having a home that you care for and improve to your own 
benefit also increases value, personal and economic. That is important to the 
growth of the economy and to social capital.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Sociocracy: A Deeper Democracy
http://www.sociocracy.info