[p2p-research] Walkability: check it before choosing your next home!

[Patrick Anderson]

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:

> How about a new city in the USA designed for walkability?

Walkability is hindered by a property tax structure that punishes
improvements instead of weighing against excessive holdings.

This creates a 'speculation' market for physical location where
investors (or even innocent farmers that find themselves
encroached-upon by the growth of a city) can hold large amounts of
land *just as long* as they do not develop it.

This is why we see so many underdeveloped patches within cities.
These unproductive lots add distance to our travel and so cause
excessive transport of both goods and humans.


> the deeper issue is how we build our ideology into our physical infrastructure.

The P2P movement can create a physical infrastructure if we can
formulate a realistic "cost recovery" mechanism so we can begin
hosting the intiatives we seek.

This requirement applies to 'online' work such as a social networking
site that needs physical computers and buildings and electricity and
workers to install and manage them etc.

And applies equally to 'offline' work such as installing useful plants
and mushrooms on 'public' grounds within our GNU city.

In either case we must discover a way to cover the expenses of operation.

Governments have traditionally taken the approach of "gather a bunch
of money into a slush-fund, then dole-out funding to projects as some
'representative' council sees fit".

A much more direct, and in my opinion, "P2P" approach that avoids some
of the "Tyranny of the Majority", allowing citizens to retain much
more control would be:

1. Allow any citizen to 'advertise' any project proposal.
2. Other citizens that become interested may choose to fund those projects.
2a. Funding can be in the form of Money (Will add X$) or Labor (Will
work to accomlish Y amount of some goal) or Physical assets (Will
supply a roto-tiller during some window of time).
3. When any project receives enough funding, then it can begin implementation.
4. Citizens who helped fund the project are stakeholders in the same %
that they invested.
5. Citizen do not fund projects they do not care about, so have much
more control.