Change the rules

So what we seem to have here is a no-win situation, a conflict between fundamental rights.

Millions of people in America live in manufactured housing. Most of those people own their homes, but not the land underneath those homes. Those millions of people are thus in an extremely vulnerable situation. Landowners might evict these homeowners at any time, or they could raise the rent on the land so that the homeowners could not afford to stay there. When that happens, relocating a manufactured home may be prohibitively expensive or flat-out impossible, resulting in these people losing not just the land beneath their homes, but their homes as well.

It seems that somebody's rights will need to be restricted. Either the landowners' rights to do what they want with their own land will be severely constrained, or else the homeowners' rights not to be exploited and abused and kicked while they're down* will be tossed aside. Neither choice is acceptable, and the usual approach of splitting the difference isn't particularly attractive for either side.

So the dilemma is real and serious and perplexing. It seems almost like the Kobayashi Maru, the academy test from Star Trek designed to measure officers' character when faced with a no-win situation. There was only one way to beat such a test, Capt. Kirk decided: cheat. When faced with a no-win situation, you have to change the rules of the game.

As long as one party owns the home and another party owns the land underneath it, conflicts of fundamental human and property rights will be unavoidable. So, then, change the rules of the game. The solution to a situation in which the land and the home are owned by different people is to create a situation in which the land and the home are not owned by different people. The solution is to create a situation in which those millions of Americans living in trailer parks become the owners of those trailer parks.

This is already starting to happen, at least in a small way. Here's a press release announcing the involvement of one New Jersey-based nonprofit in such an effort in Delaware. READS will be working with the Delaware Manufactured-Home Owners Association to help the First State's 38,000 manufactured-home owners become the owners of the land underneath their homes. This is happening as part of the nationwide effort coordinated by New Hampshire-based ROCUSA. ROC stands for "resident owned communities," which is what we're talking about here.

Here, again, is how ROCUSA summarizes its mission:

ROC USA is a social enterprise that offers training, networking, and financing to help homeowners gain security through community ownership.

ROC USA solves the financial and technical challenges faced by homeowners when they seek to acquire their manufactured home communities. Today there are roughly 3.5 million US homeowners in an estimated 50,000 manufactured home communities.

Through ROC USA and its national network of Certified Technical Assistance Providers, homeowners can join together with their neighbors to acquire the manufactured home community in which they live, and be secure and thrive in resident-owned communities.

Here's my immodest proposal: Let's turn all of those 50,000 manufactured home communities into resident-owned communities.

To get there from here might require some changes in state and local laws, tax codes and zoning regulations, so state legislators are going to need to get in touch with people like the folks at ROCUSA to find out what kind of changes would help to ease and expedite this transition, what kind of incentives might be offered and what hurdles (such as access to credit for the homeowners) might need to be cleared.

The only problem with the goal of this transition would be that it would mean the end of the trailer-park owner industry. That's not really much of a problem, though, since everybody in that industry is already looking for a way out. (That is, after all, the basis for this whole dilemma in the first place.)

Some of these communities might adopt a land-trust model, many others might simply become more traditional neighborhoods, where individual lots are individually owned. There's nothing socialist about this idea -- it's not like we'd be creating kibbutzes or something. We're talking about real homeownership -- red-blooded American capitalism.

There's also nothing inherently partisan about this goal. It seems to me that both Democrats and Republicans would have ideological reasons for supporting such a transition. Apart from the question of local or regional vested interests -- particular developers with their particular corrupt legislators -- I don't see much reason for any political opposition.

Obviously, therefore, I'm missing something. So here's where I need your help: Why shouldn't the transition to resident-ownership be a goal in every state or province with land-lease manufactured-home communities? What political, ideological, economic, etc., reasons might there be to oppose such a goal?

Unnecessary clarifying addenda: I didn't anticipate that the idea of manufactured-home owners purchasing the land under their homes might be interpreted as the moral/legal equivalent of Hugo Chavez nationalizing them. I don't really need anyone to point out the potential objections to government confiscation of landowners property because I object to that myself already, thanks. If I didn't, the dilemma discussed above wouldn't be much of a dilemma.

What I'm looking for is what rational, real-world objections anyone might have to what ROCUSA et. al. are actually doing: Helping homeowners purchase the land under their homes at a fair price. I'm beginning to suspect that there aren't actually any rational objections to such a goal, only irrational ones that involve seeing socialist bogeymen where none exist.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Where, you may be asking, is this right not to be exploited and abused guaranteed? It's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Nor is it recognizably honored by custom. That will lead some people to argue that talk of such a "right" makes no sense. Perhaps they're right about that. Maybe even this most fundamental right is meaningless unless it is explicitly enumerated in the law. And maybe Moses and the prophets were fools. Maybe there is no God or gods, or at least no God or gods that give a rat's ass about the poor, the powerless, the orphans or widows. Maybe there's no such thing as karma. Or ghosts. Maybe Dives isn't in torment. Maybe all talk of justice is just a mask for envy or the will-to-power. But then again maybe not.

Comments

[sleepy]

Where, you may be asking, is this right not to be exploited and abused guaranteed? It's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Nor is it recognizably honored by custom. That will lead some people to argue that talk of such a "right" makes no sense. Perhaps they're right about that. Maybe even this most fundamental right is meaningless unless it is explicitly enumerated in the law. And maybe Moses and the prophets were fools. Maybe there is no God or gods, or at least no God or gods that give a rat's ass about the poor, the powerless, the orphans or widows. Maybe there's no such thing as karma. Or ghosts. Maybe Dives isn't in torment. Maybe all talk of justice is just a mask for envy or the will-to-power. But then again maybe not.

Government powers are enumerated, and ex post facto laws are explicitly forbidden. You don't get to retroactively punish landowners for doing something that was perfectly legal at the time simply because you consider it immoral (and "some changes in state and local laws, tax codes and zoning regulation" sounds like at least a partial confiscation of their property). The state doesn't get to assume new powers simply because you consider the results moral. You don't get to use God to argue for a political position in exactly the same manner conservatives are called "theocrats" for doing.

There may be a God demanding a change in peoples' hearts. There is no God demanding new laws.

[Ecks]

Well, if you want some devils advocacy:

The owners of the parks are people with their own right to pursue life liberty and happiness. They made an investment in a real estate project, and have been more successful in this dealing than the people with whom they transacted. Why should they have their assets seized purely because they have acted in their own interests with good business acumen?

The general model of taxation is that we harness economic activity for the greater good by skimming money from successful endeavours and using it to build roads. This is an entirely different enterprise, as we are not skimming a percent of profits, we are seizing the assets that made the productive commerce profitable in the first place.

[Gray]

It seems that somebody's rights will need to be restricted. Either the landowners' rights to do what they want with their own land will be severely constrained, or else the homeowners' rights not to be exploited and abused and kicked while they're down* will be tossed aside. Neither choice is acceptable, and the usual approach of splitting the difference isn't particularly attractive for either side.

And right after saying this, your proposal just decides that if you can split the difference, and neither choice is acceptable... then go with the proposal that restricts the landowner's rights, and try to make it sound like it's a compromise.

The simple fact is, that the people who bough a manufactured home, on a lot they didn't own, KNEW this when they did so. I fail to see why the owners of the land all of a sudden should be forced by the government to sell their land (and likely at a rate decided upon by the government) to the homeowners who made such a bad decision in the first place.

Manufactured housing lots/mobile home sites have ALWAYS been transitory living. They have never been intended to be a place to raise then next 10 generations of your family.

[Fred Clark]

Sleepy --

What motivated the inventions and inversions in that response? The imagined confiscation? The introduction of the idea of punishment? Not so much wrong as weirdly beside the point.

There are a lot of posts on a lot of topics in the archives here. You should check those out and see if you can find someplace where you actually disagree with something I actually advocated. Your free-floating hostility might find a better fit there than here.

-- Fred

[sleepy]

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Gry, th gvrnmnt cld py fll mrkt prcs fr th lnd, bt tht wld lt th gnrl pblc knw THY wld hv t py fr ths bt f Scl Jstc. 'd bt Frd Clrk thnks th gnrl pblc wld nl spprt hs gls f thy cld b cnvncd smn ls wld hv t py fr t.

[Ed. note: Scott's pretending-he's-not-crazy pseudonyms will continue to be overlooked, but the thinly veiled ones get disemvowelled.]

[SweetCraspy]

Disemvowelling?

Et tu, Slacktivist?

[SweetCraspy]

Disemvowelling?

Et tu, Slacktivist?

[Jeff]

Manufactured housing lots/mobile home sites have ALWAYS been transitory living. They have never been intended to be a place to raise then next 10 generations of your family.

Bzzzzt! Wrong! Check out the comments on ANY of the MH threads.

Scott's pretending-he's-not-crazy pseudonyms will continue to be overlooked

I'm betting "Gray" is one of those.

[Jeff]

BTW, Ecks, did you check the Dates page on the Slacktivistas wiki?

[malraux]

It seems that something along the lines of a right of first refusal to the mobile home residents would be closest thing to a compromise that could be found. It does take away something from the land owner, but I'd say that the limited infringement upon his right to sell certainly balances against the rights of the mobile home owners. The only major problem I see is that this would grant a right to an entity that might not exist, but if the right is only granted upon formation of such an entity, then perhaps that's workable.

[Robb]

Manufactured housing lots/mobile home sites have ALWAYS been transitory living. They have never been intended to be a place to raise then next 10 generations of your family.

Bzzzzt! Wrong! Check out the comments on ANY of the MH threads.

I think that's only if you're looking at "mobile home" parks, which vary from de facto retirement communities (I drive through one every day) to tenements in glorified sheds (I drive right by one every day). I can't imagine anyone aspiring to live in most MH parks (though there are undoubtedly many nice ones out there), but there are many people out there (myself included) that see living in a manufactured home (or whatever the euphemism may be) as an option on par with most stick built single family houses.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for these house-but-not-land-owning-serfs as I nearly became one of them, and despite my frustrating housing state, I'm quite glad I didn't end up in that trap.

*****

So. . . sleepy is the new Scott? Our all powerful host has an IP tracker with which to know those that defy him? Fear ye, defiant Libertarians, O heedlessly using the phrase "commie" in a completely unironic manner!

*****

Speaking of uppity Libertarians, wassup with the Ron Paul book in the Red Dress section on the right?

[Jon H]

To work, the mobile home owners would probably have to buy the land under their trailer or an identical plot of land nearby with trailer relocation provided.

That would handle the case where some of the mobile home owners in a development leave, but some want to stay. If their homes stay put, mixed with vacant lots, then the mobile home park land isn't very useful. If, on the other hand, the people staying can be moved into adjacent lots off to one side, it would free up contiguous space for reuse. So the property owner might find it more acceptable.

I would think that moving a mobile home 100 yards or so is probably a bit easier than moving one on the road. Could probably just rent a big crane or king-size forklift.

[M Groesbeck]

This is a conflict between fundamental rights if you consider the absolutist/metaphysical reading of property (in which government and/or society simply enforce a relationship which is claimed to exist between a person and inanimate object or piece of land) as settled. If, however, we are to treat property as a socially-negotiated relationship between people with respect to land and inanimate objects (with the state acting as an arbitrator accountable to all parties), there's more room for negotiation. It's ultimately the state which establishes a landowner's claim over a piece of property on the theory that doing so will ultimately be in the public interest; it's not unreasonable for the public (through the state) to require a bit of reciprocation when the landowner's actions threaten the basic security of the people living in these communities.

(The content of that reciprocation or negotiation is another matter -- it's just not productive to consider any claim of ownership as something which is absolute or something other than a negotiated social position.)

[Michèle my bell-flower]

What's so bad about socialism, anyway? I honestly don't understand why it's a "dirty word".

[Matthew L.]

The problem is, a large part of the reason mobile homes are cheaper than ordinary constructed homes, is precisely because the house owner doesn't buy the land at the same time---you'll find figures that manufactured homes cost half as much per square foot, but the footnotes include the remark "figures for site-built homes include cost of land", and cost of land is approximately half of the home price. Modular homes, which are built on homeowner land, just like a conventional house, are cheaper than conventional houses, but not nearly as much cheaper than pre-manufactured houses are (about a 10-20% reduction in cost, as opposed to 50%).

If we want to reduce the number of people stuck with homes on land they don't own---and we should want that, I think---the solution will probably involve discouraging "mobile" homes altogether.

[Matthew L.]

Let me emphasize that I meant discouraging mobile homes in the long run, which is not a short term solution. In the short-term, I have no ideas whatsoever.

[Robb]

What's so bad about socialism, anyway?

See: here. Yeah, it doesn't make that much sense to me either - the idea of collective, sharable material possessions & land isn't all that terrible, and humanity has been doing it for most of it's history. Well, maybe not collective ownership in the sense that most socialists view it, but indivdual ownership in the capitalistic sense we understand it now is a much newer idea, even if selfishness isn't.

The idea Fred is championing here is almost a best of both worlds combo - it's property ownership, with (some) privileges of equity & ownership, but in a collective sense such that the burden of payment is distributed & eased on the individuals within that collective.

[Michèle my bell-flower]

> See: here.

OK, I only skimmed the article, but... that's about Communism and as far as I know, Communism <> Socialism.

Why do USians seem to get the two confused?

[Michèle my bell-flower]

Hey, found this.

George Bernard Shaw
Socialism and Liberty
Written: 1928;
Source: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism;
Published: Pelican Books, 1937;

Haven't read the whole thing yet, but seems interesting.

[Drake Pope]

Why do USians seem to get the two confused?

Have you ever heard of the Soviet Union?

Let me emphasize that I meant discouraging mobile homes in the long run, which is not a short term solution. In the short-term, I have no ideas whatsoever.

Boy, don't you wish there was some sort of system that would encourage home ownership? Someone should invent such a system and implement it, hopefully in such a way that will reduce the need for this whole mobile home thing, which doesn't really work if you judge by the posts on this subject that appear on this website.

[Robb]

Why do USians seem to get the two confused?

There's plenty of reasons out there - many are variations on "Americans are dumb", some focusing on the influence of capitalism, but quite honestly, no one knows for sure, and I don't know that it can be effectively explained in any sort of comprehensive sense (ie - some Americans are dumb, some are too heavily influenced by capitalism, etc.)

I like to think we're at least a little smarter than we were in the 50s, but then I think about how the word "Communist" was thrown around as both an accusation & a pejorative, and the parallels to today's usage of "terrorist". (Side note - how hard is the Bush administration going to push to put Salim Hamdan away forever because he's an "unlawful combatant"? They can't say "terrorist" because they can't come close to proving it, but they want to label him that way - the bastards.)

Thanks for the GB Shaw link - my brain is unable to take in anything more serious than comments at the moment, but I'll definitely give that a read in the refreshed AM.

[Mabus]

I'm a little baffled by sleepy and Gray, who seem to think that Fred is suggesting that the government confiscate the trailer park land, when he's clearly stated he wants the people living on the land to be able to own it.

It sounds to me as if Fred's proposal involves both private land ownership and simplification of government regulations on land sales. I'm all for it, and I can't see why any genuine libertarian would disagree.

[Lurker]

There may be a God demanding a change in peoples' hearts. There is no God demanding new law

It is interesting to note that in rather main-stream conservative thought, God is demanding new case or statute law, if the objective is to stop legal abortion. However, if the objective is to fulfil the society's duty not to exploit the poor, the conservatives' God seems to be content with demanding a change in peoples' hearts.

[Caravelle]

Why do USians seem to get the two confused?

There's plenty of reasons out there - many are variations on "Americans are dumb", some focusing on the influence of capitalism, but quite honestly, no one knows for sure, and I don't know that it can be effectively explained in any sort of comprehensive sense (ie - some Americans are dumb, some are too heavily influenced by capitalism, etc.)

I disagree, I don't think the explanation here is "Americans are dumb". For me it's, on the one hand, the US's cold-war rivalry with the Soviet Union encouraged black-and-white thinking where "socialism" got naturally stuck in the same black as "communism", and on the other hand the right-wing has been framing the debate for decades, and they're very good at it. They invented the Overton Window after all. And in the right-wing frame, socialism is just communism lite.

I think that's changing though. Universal Healthcare also used to be a bad word but now everybody on the left uses it unashamedly. Say what you will about Moore, he was pretty good at shifting the Overton Window that way.
The US needs more vocal (and publicly heard, which is no problem because the media's liberal ! right ? right ?) far-left wingers to make the moderates seem reasonable and so that the US can have an actual left wing.

[smallcatharine]

As a European (Dutch) I find this really strange. Where I come from, owning the house without owning the ground is associated with places like the Princengracht - minimum price per monumental building 2 million euro. Of course, all constructions for this except tenure by long lease are pretty much illegal.
We do have problems with gypsies who live in a situations somewhat similar to trailer park people. Many local governaments are trying to split up groups because of the various nuisances they tend to cause (not paying sewer and other local taxes, dumping waste, noise, sometimes drug dealing). However any of them can rent cooperation houses whenever they want, they don't even have to get on the waiting list.

[smallcatharine]

As a European (Dutch) I find this really strange. Where I come from, owning the house without owning the ground is associated with places like the Princengracht - minimum price per monumental building 2 million euro. Of course, all constructions for this except tenure by long lease are pretty much illegal.
We do have problems with gypsies who live in a situations somewhat similar to trailer park people. Many local governaments are trying to split up groups because of the various nuisances they tend to cause (not paying sewer and other local taxes, dumping waste, noise, sometimes drug dealing). However any of them can rent cooperation houses whenever they want, they don't even have to get on the waiting list.

[Jenny Islander]

There used to be a neighborhood in Anchorage that was mostly trailer parks--each on its own lawn, often with a deck or planter boxes or both, with a well-kept older-model pickup parked out front. They were nice places to raise kids, by and large: lots of room to play, very little traffic. Retirees also liked them because a well insulated single-wide with an Arctic entry is fairly cheap to maintain.

But the owners, see, wanted to move to Florida or Arizona or out to their own little piece of heaven in a lodge someplace. So they sold the trailer parks for subdivision, and now each of them is packed with condos that have less living space in them than those single-wide trailers, tiny balconies or no balconies at all, no lawns, and NO PARKING WHATSOEVER. If you live there, you park between the white line and the sidewalk, winter and summer. Plus you know it if the neighbors have screaming fights, or cockroaches, or a colicky baby. And people pay through the nose in order to live there. But property values have gone up!

Meanwhile, the tenants of the trailer parks . . . well, for the money they had budgeted for space rent (most of the trailers were paid for), they could possibly, if their income was below the right level, get into an even smaller, darker, crappier version of the condos in a low-income fourplex or apartment house someplace.

And the trailers and the decks and the window boxes have been junked.

Sometimes I have Prince Caspian's opinion of progress.

All of this to say that if some non-profit had stepped forward and said, "This is wrong, these are people's homes, let's start a fund to help them get a low-interest loan to buy their own land," I would have written a check. I can't see a single thing wrong with denying somebody the "right" to yank somebody else's life out from under him.

[Mabus]

Lurker: It is interesting to note that in rather main-stream conservative thought, God is demanding new case or statute law, if the objective is to stop legal abortion. However, if the objective is to fulfil the society's duty not to exploit the poor, the conservatives' God seems to be content with demanding a change in peoples' hearts.

This is the basic difference between justice-obligations (which can rightly be fixed via the law) and mercy-obligations (which by their nature go beyond what the law demands, and therefore can't be solved by adjusting laws). Giving a person something which they have not paid or worked for is either an act of mercy, if it's voluntary, or an injustice inflicted on the "giver", if it's coerced.

The left, desiring to obscure this simple distinction, has coined the term "social justice".

[Praline]

It seems that something along the lines of a right of first refusal to the mobile home residents would be closest thing to a compromise that could be found. It does take away something from the land owner, but I'd say that the limited infringement upon his right to sell certainly balances against the rights of the mobile home owners. The only major problem I see is that this would grant a right to an entity that might not exist

There is another problem, as Fred points out: tenants will almost certainly need help to buy the land. Almost inevitably, people buy the nicest house they can afford: if all they can afford is a mobile home, then they're no more likely to have spare money to buy the land under it at short notice than anybody else would be. If they had that kind of money, they'd probably have bought a house in the first place. Anything that helps them to buy it has to be a good thing.

(Anyone who blames the tenants for lacking foresight or buying above their means in this situation gets a poke in the ribs. Is the housing market heaving with livable, cheap accommodation? Do you have a vast amount of choice when you're short of money? If it's a choice between a mobile home and nothing, should the prudent person sleep on the streets to save money? Given the unbelievable expense of property, buying what you can afford and hoping for the best is as much as most people can manage.)

Why do USians seem to get the two confused?

Have you ever heard of the Soviet Union?

Yes, Drake, and it was Communist, not Socialist. There is a difference. The Right has long tried to conflate the two in order to discredit its opponents, who are Socialist at the most extreme and liberal in the main. This is disingenuous propagandizing that any reasoning adult should be ashamed to fall for. The left-wing equivalent would be to say than anyone who supports free markets must admire Pinochet - and we don't go around saying that.

It is interesting to note that in rather main-stream conservative thought, God is demanding new case or statute law, if the objective is to stop legal abortion. However, if the objective is to fulfil the society's duty not to exploit the poor, the conservatives' God seems to be content with demanding a change in peoples' hearts.

Made me laugh. The human tendency to insist that God is in favour of whatever legal measure you want passed is one of the main reasons why God's best left out of political discourse.

I can't see a single thing wrong with denying somebody the "right" to yank somebody else's life out from under him.

Thank you! Talking about it as a property issue removes the human element from the discourse -but rights and laws are set up to serve humanity. That's what they're for. In situations like this, what we're basically talking about is a conflict of interests - and who will suffer more is surely an important point to consider. The landowner may suffer some investment setbacks if they're obliged to consider the rights of the tenants, but they won't be homeless. Too many people are saying that the tenants should have realised the landowners could sell the land; why is nobody saying that the landowners should have realised that the tenants have property rights when it comes to their own houses? 'You should have seen it coming' cuts both ways.

Incidentally, can someone tell an English girl why trailer park owners are all trying to get out of the industry? If there's a massive move to get out, frankly a government-sponsored initiative to buy the land and hold it to sell to homeowners at a pace they can afford sounds perfectly feasible.

[Till]

Low interest loans to encourage the acquisition of real estate, given to economically weak people, with the loans bundled together to avoid massive harm from widespread inability to pay the rates - didn't I read about a concept like this here before...? :-)

[sleepy]

but rights and laws are set up to serve humanity

There is no "humanity", as an amorphous concept requiring you to speak for it and exercise power in its name. You can make the same claim about every right, even ones you support.

If socialism <> communism, why were so many socialists so enamored of the old Soviet Union, even after its mass murdering ways were known, before its collapse made that untenable?

[sleepy]

I got one for you, would you give a mobile home owner more or less protection from his landlord than you would a regular homeowner facing a government exercising eminent domain to take _his_ house?

[Kit]

Is it logical to ban Scott and then allow his posts, even disemvowelled, under a different pseudonym, when it's clearly the same person? It doesn't seem consistent to me. Obviously this site is yours, Fred, and you should manage it however you see fit (and I hope you're having a great day); I just wonder if allowing disemvowelled posts to stand will encourage Scott to redouble his efforts.

[Praline]

Oops, that last post was me, using my actual first name.

[MikhailBorg]

It's too early for me to come up with an intelligent comment on the issue, so for now, I'll simply say: Kobayashi Maru reference yay!

[cjmr]

Incidentally, can someone tell an English girl why trailer park owners are all trying to get out of the industry? If there's a massive move to get out, frankly a government-sponsored initiative to buy the land and hold it to sell to homeowners at a pace they can afford sounds perfectly feasible.

Well, the park owners around here that want to get out of the business want to sell the land to developers for way more than the tenants are bringing in. The two trailer parks that were broken up in our previous town in the past five years are now a mixed-use hotel/retail complex and an ice cream factory. The last remaining trailer park within the town boundary is likely to remain so because it's in a floodplain, on an isolated road, and isn't likely to become suddenly valuable.

[Praline]

I like to think we're at least a little smarter than we were in the 50s, but then I think about how the word "Communist" was thrown around as both an accusation & a pejorative, and the parallels to today's usage of "terrorist".

Thinking that we're smarter than our forebears just because we're more recent is an easy way to get into trouble. Good judgement can regress as well as progress - otherwise, you'd expect the Americans of the twenties, thirties and forties to be more paranoid than those of the fifties. You'd expect the suffragettes of the early twentieth century to be less feminist than 1950s housewives. Things can move backwards as well as forwards.

And people who want to take advantage can easily play on complacency. 'I know your grandpa stood up and fought against McCarthy, but that was a long time ago. We're much more modern now. Here, just sign this Patriot Act, why don't you?'

If you think about it, most periods of tyranny are preceded by periods of greater freedom. If it were impossible for tyranny to grow out of freedom, no new tyrannies would ever emerge, and history demonstrates that, y'know, they do.

[Cowboy Diva]

smallCatharine,
your descriptions of cooperation houses have no equivalent in the US. Section 8 housing seems to come close, but that has its own issues as well.
In the US, being homeless is the equivalent to what living rough in Britain (not familiar with the Continent sorry), as near as I can figure, and in truth the lives of most living in manufactured homes in the US are much more stable than those truly considered homeless.
There are a quite a few manufactured homes in my small rural town; it is considered a good starting point for a young couple just out of high school with job(s) at a local sawmill, especially as the local infrastructure cannot handle new housing and there are very few permanent homes available for sale.

[Vince]

Here are some objections that come to my mind, but maybe I misunderstand the problem.

1) Park owners are getting a rent for their land from the homeowners. They only sell because they can get a lot more money at once from an outside buyer than they would get overtime from their tenants. Therefore, if the tenants get the right of first refusal, at what price? The price offered by the developer? How are they going to afford that? With a loan? What makes you think they would be able to repay it and, if they actually are, why have they not moved out already for a better accommodation? Also, what if they cannot afford to pay for the land under their home, at any price?

2) The developers who buy the park want to build something on most, if not all, of it. If half the homeowners buy the land and the other half doesn't, would the developer still be interested in the other half? My guess is no. Fred has made the point over and over again that, for all intents and purposes, the homes are NOT mobile: they cannot been placed on another part of the lot. Could the residents "trade" their home with another one placed in a different part of the lot, and get the land under that one instead? Would they be willing to do so? Would it lead to the remaining residents being segregated on the worst part of the lot? Would it lead to them taking over the prime real estate and leaving the less desirable locations to the developer? Who gets to decide?

3) I think there might be a notion of a trust buying the entire park (at the cost offered by the developer?) and then selling back the lots to their individual tenants at cost, or with a low-cost mortgage. This is obviously a money drain. There is not profit in it for the trust, assuming the interest rate on the mortgages is set to simply keep up with inflation, and it ties up a large amount of money. Where does that money come from? Remember that the trust setup in this model is created specifically because the residents cannot afford to buy the land under their homes directly.

These are practical, rather than moral, objections, but unless I gravely misunderstood Fred's idea, I believe they make his project a pipe dream.

[J]

Where, you may be asking, is this right not to be exploited and abused guaranteed? It's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Nor is it recognizably honored by custom.

That's not true. It is a right in equity, if not in law. We have lots of rights in equity and there is a vast, invisible court system that protects them and punishes infractions. It has little to do with gods or stone tablets and everything to do with community happiness and decency. If that's an inadequate basis for someone to respect other people and treating them well, then I really don't want to know you.

And maybe Moses and the prophets were fools.

I don't like the prophets anymore, particularly after having read this book. We praise the prophets for championing--and calling on others to champion--the cause of the poor. But upon re-reading things, it comes across more and more to me as an essentially anti-intellectual, xenophobic endeavor designed to criticize, no not wealthy or powerful people but rather educated and broad-minded ones. Elijah hated Jezebel not because she was evil or sexually wanton but because she was not an Israelite (she was Phoenician) and didn't worship Yahweh alone (she DID worship Yahweh, but also brought along 500-some priests and priestesses of Asherah and some other local gods with her--whom Elijah supposedly had many killed).

As I've gotten a little more wise to the world, the prophets now seem to me less and less like Gandhi or MLK and more like Anthony Comstock and Savonarola. If they talk about "the plight of the poor", it's rarely a genuine sentiment but more like the old Peronist chant "Bread yes, books no!"

As should surprise no one, I'll take Jezebel* and the New Atheists over the prophet Elijah and 'the Emerging Church'.

*Fred, a while back you mentioned Jezebel as a bad choice for biblical names for children. Except that there are lots of girls and women named after Jezebel. They're just named after her original Phoenician name "Isabel" ('Ith'Baal'; "woman of the lord") rather than the derogatory one the Hebrews gave her "Jezebel" ("woman of dung").

[Drake Pope]

Yes, Drake, and it was Communist, not Socialist. There is a difference. The Right has long tried to conflate the two in order to discredit its opponents, who are Socialist at the most extreme and liberal in the main.

The Right?!? No, no, I seem to recall that the Soviet Union itself was the one that used the words Socialist and Communist interchangeably. They called their country, the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics. It's their own fault that this started; if they had simply given up the wonderful alliterative value of their name and made their English name the USCR then none of this would have happened in the first place. Yeah, the American Right did exploit this mistake and continues to do so with clumsy scare tactics to this day, but they wouldn't have been able to if the communists hadn't made it so damn easy.

Oops, that last post was me, using my actual first name.

You shouldn't do that, Ed. Blog are dark and full of terrors.

What makes you think they would be able to repay it

They probably can't. That's actually causing a bit of problems these days, with banks and other credit institutions offering loans and credit cards and stuff to people (and animals) who can't pay it back, then acting surprised when they check their balances and realize that they gave 2.8 million dollars in "student loans" to a poplar tree in Georgia. Fortunately, being a free-market capitalist country run by a free-market capitalist cowboy, these banks are lucky enough to be able to feed at the taxpayer trough at the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is my favorite part about this whole issue. It's "communism" for the government to give money to poor people (or to do anything to alleviate their poverty) but it's "capitalism" for the government to give money to large corporations.

[Praline]

It's their own fault that this started

That's just childish. Plenty of regimes misname themselves, or use names that change their meaning over time. Whatever Communist Russia called itself, there's no excuse for implying someone's a Stalinist because they support government regulation of trade and capitalism.

The point is not whose fault it is. The point is, is it okay, today, right now, to imply that someone supports killing millions of people and executing political dissidents because they favour a left-leaning set of policies? The answer is no, so however it got started, it's high time to stop doing it.

[J]

This is my favorite part about this whole issue. It's "communism" for the government to give money to poor people (or to do anything to alleviate their poverty) but it's "capitalism" for the government to give money to large corporations.

True. And just to harp shamelessly on own pet issue, billions for highways and airports are "investments" whereas a few hundred million for passenger rail are "subsidies".

[J]

Plenty of regimes misname themselves, or use names that change their meaning over time.

Didn't the Onion already point that out? Something like "People's Democratic Republic of Congo Contains Three Blatant Falsehoods in Its Name"

[Drake Pope]

That's just childish. Plenty of regimes misname themselves, or use names that change their meaning over time. Whatever Communist Russia called itself, there's no excuse for implying someone's a Stalinist because they support government regulation of trade and capitalism.

The point is not whose fault it is. The point is, is it okay, today, right now, to imply that someone supports killing millions of people and executing political dissidents because they favour a left-leaning set of policies? The answer is no, so however it got started, it's high time to stop doing it.

So it's childish. What's your point? It works, it gets votes, and it'll never stop until left-wingers in this country grow up and show some goddamn spine and stand up for their principles instead of mincing and shifting and capitulating in every issue that matters to them. Universal health care is one issue that they must know that they can win; even moderate Republicans recognize that this is a problem in the United States, yet even with bipartisan support we can't even override a Presidential veto against health care for children.

So, yeah, it works, and yeah, they're not going to stop. Why should they? Would you stop a clearly effective campaign like that, if you were a political operative?

Didn't the Onion already point that out? Something like "People's Democratic Republic of Congo Contains Three Blatant Falsehoods in Its Name"

That's just not so. Congo contains people, and it's near the Congo River, and technically it's a republic (in the same way the Soviet Union was made of republics).

[Amaryllis]

smallcatherine: Where I come from, owning the house without owning the ground is associated with places like the Princengracht - minimum price per monumental building 2 million euro. Of course, all constructions for this except tenure by long lease are pretty much illegal.

Sounds something like Maryland's "ground rent" housing, where you own the house but the land is owned by someone else. Leases are long, usually 99 years, and renewable in perpetuity, and rents are small, $24 to around $250 per year. These are ordinary, permanent-construction houses, although usually not "monumental," more often low- to middle-income housing. I live in one myself, in a stable middle-class neighborhood.

Obviously, these houses aren't going anywhere, and they're scattered, individual buildings rather than contiguous plots of land. But during the recent housing boom, some ground-rent owners found it profitable to exploit this rather arcane area of real-estate law for considerable profit. People could be evicted from their homes over small amounts of overdue ground rent, or at best wind up paying fees and costs far in excess of the original debt. (Although the rent amounts are small, peole could get into trouble if the ground-rent ownership changed hands and the notification wasn't made to the homeowner, if a mortage was paid off and the ground-rent bills weren't sent or weren't understood correctly, if the homeowner died and the heirs weren't aware of the ground-rent situation, things like that. The burden of keeping track of the creditor, the payment address, and the debt was on the homeowner, not the ground-rent owner.)

In the articles cited above, one woman lost her home over at debt that started at around $1200, IIRC. The ground rent owner evicted her and sold the house for $70,000 to a speculator who resold it for something like $125,000.
A ground-rent owner: "Business is business. I can't deny an incentive to make a windfall profit."
The homeowner: "Everyone made a profit on this but me."

Laws have recently been reformed so that "ejectment" is a last resort rather than a first, with ground-rent debts subjected to more ordinary debt-collection procedures; to return any profit from an ejectment sale in excess of the debt and fees to the homeowner; and to make ground-rent easier for the homeowner to buy out. Predictably, the reforms are the subject of lawsuits by disgruntled ground-rent owners.

But it does show that laws can be changed to even up an imbalance between two conflicting sets of rights -- perfectly capitalistic property-owning rights. No socialism necessary.

[not someone else]

They're just named after her original Phoenician name "Isabel" ('Ith'Baal'; "woman of the lord") rather than the derogatory one the Hebrews gave her "Jezebel" ("woman of dung").

Really? Most things I can find states that "Isabel" is a variant of "Elizabeth" through Spanish. Though, in Hebrew, those are essentially the same word as far as I remember, so I can see why there would be a relation posited.

Is this something you got from the book you mentioned, or someplace else?

Sorry; language nerd. :)

[J]

Really? Most things I can find states that "Isabel" is a variant of "Elizabeth" through Spanish. Though, in Hebrew, those are essentially the same word as far as I remember, so I can see why there would be a relation posited.

Is this something you got from the book you mentioned, or someplace else?

I don't remember where I heard it, but the Jezebel book I read laid it all out more clearly than I'd seen it before. Elizabeth is indeed the Latinization/Anglicization of "Isabel".

Something else I learned from that book: Elijah did NOT eat "honey and locusts", he ate honey the seeds of the locust tree.

[Fred Davis]

This is my favorite part about this whole issue. It's "communism" for the government to give money to poor people (or to do anything to alleviate their poverty) but it's "capitalism" for the government to give money to large corporations.

No, the grand irony is that it's "stalinism" to suggest that a democracy has an obligation to ensure that its citizenry isn't dying of easily treatable diseases and ailments, but it's not "stalinism" to suggest that the government has unlimited rights to detain and spy on its citizenry and to then violate the human rights of anyone it merely suspects of actually committing a wrong-doing.

[Jeff]

Giving a person something which they have not paid or worked for is either an act of mercy, if it's voluntary, or an injustice inflicted on the "giver", if it's coerced.

So a public education is mercy or coercion? And you wonder why we mock libertarians (ick-pooie!).

In the current instance, the home owners have paid for their homes -- it's the land owners who are making that investment worthless (about equivalent to a libertarian's soul).

===============================

Something like "People's Democratic Republic of Congo Contains Three Blatant Falsehoods in Its Name"

Or, even earlier, "Holy Roman Empire".