After a year’s delay, the video of Claude Lewenz’s keynote speech at the Australian Thought Leaders conference arrived and an edited version went up on www.villageforum.com. It was seen by a senior American news producer at one of the big-three networks, who offered to come down on television’s equivalent of the busman’s holiday. He brought with him professional camera gear, and left us a box of DV tapes from which to produce on-line clips… kindly offering suggestions on how to further edit them as we put them up on the web site.
When he arrive, he suggested that we consider re-pitching the concept of VillageTowns to address the serious economic meltdown being faced in the USA and elsewhere. So, let’s begin with this conversation…
It breaks down into two parts – building VillageTowns as a way of extracting a nation from an economic crisis, and how VillageTowns are probably the best investment an ordinary person can make, along the lines of “never invest in real estate you can’t walk to”. Let’s explore these two and then open it up for a conversation.
According to Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, the USA overproduced its housing stock by a million new units. So how can building VillageTowns with 4000 new units make any sense at all? It has do with location. The building boom was for 20th century housing – commuter housing, suburban housing and housing that depends on a global economy to hold value. While those 1 million homes will stay vacant or be torn down, VillageTown housing will see high demand. From a national perspective, this will provide jobs in construction and all the ancillary trades and industries that provide goods and services to a new development. From an investment (mortgage) perspective, it will make a sound investment.
From a personal perspective, one must want to live in a VillageTown in order for it to make sense. Presuming that, the VillageTown becomes the kind of investment that provides for a lifetime and can be remarkably durable during bad economic conditions. The key is the 80/20 economy. The 20% sell local to global economy enables the VillageTown to thrive during normal or boom times. It is the 80% local to local economy that keeps it viable should the global economy go into meltdown. The key is the upfront capital investment in locally securing the VillageTown’s food source, constructing low-energy, low-maintenance buildings, and generating local energy – both electric and liquid fuels. A good example of this was the difference between rural France and Australia in the Great Depression. France hardly noticed, because theirs was a local economy… people kept working and providing for local needs.
In the leadup to Y2K, Bill Gates said that the safest place in the world to be on 1-1-2000 would be Golden Bay, New Zealand. Within three days, the skies of Golden Bay were filled with helicopters chartered by real estate agents ferrying around well-heeled, first-world refugees. Some bought and some built compounds off-the-grid, with a year’s worth of food and windmills to provide electricity. By 2001 most of those folks were going stir crazy, needing to leave to earn a living and to get a measure of culture that was unobtainable in a beautiful valley at the end of the road. Problem… they planned solely for the worst-case scenario in some sort of doomsday survivalist state of affairs.
The VillageTown is not like that. It plans for the best of times, the most enriched cultural and social environment, where quality of life is the primary purpose. However, in times of economic difficulty, it may offer some solutions to those challenges as well. Unlike gold, stocks, Treasury bills or cash in a mattress, a VillageTown is real. No matter what happens, it is life, not a medium of exchange. It is experienced. It is locally controlled. If things get very bad, it still provides what people need… the basics, plus conviviality, social and intellectual stimulation, an opportunity to be productive and work even if the rest of the world is out of work.
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