Lighting a Local Economic Fire

Consider these trends:
 
1. There has been sustained, increased interest in community living the last 25 years
Since 1990, with notable spikes in 1990-95 and 2005-07, the Fellowship for Intentional Community has been tracking the volume of inquiries about community living and the number of new community starts. Interest is up and has remained so for a generation. While there are many factors that combine to make this happen, one in particular is affordability. People are worried about how to make their lives work on their own (or as nuclear families) and are increasingly interested in experimenting with the sharing characteristic of community, to create a better quality of life without having to chase as many dollars.

To be sure, what this looks like is all over the map. For some groups it's how to leverage assets to have access to an even better range of amenities by virtue of joint ownership (things like a swimming pool, hot tub, woodworking shop, exercise room full of barbells and equipment, or even a space to entertain 20 in one sitting. 

For others it's how to minimize their carbon footprint and pioneer models of high quality living on a shoestring budget (read low resource consumption).

For others still, it's about being able to age gracefully in place, without counting on your children or the government to provide a safety net.

2. Marketplace turbidity
It is much harder than ever to predict the health of the economy, which means uncertain job security, as well as uncertain retirement funds. Here are three sobering factors that contribute to this:

a) In the global economy, more and more jobs are being outsourced overseas, where wages are much lower. There is no reason to think that this won't continue, unless energy costs get high enough that overseas transportation of goods is prohibitively expensive. Given that it's considered political suicide to allow energy costs to spiral upward, don't look for this mitigating circumstance to save domestic jobs any time soon.

b) We are going through unprecedented automation of jobs as we enter the age of robotics. This is not just about spot welding on automobile assembly lines, robots are expected to soon make inroads in traditional low-paying service jobs such as flipping burgers at fast food restaurants. Fewer and fewer people can expect to find decent full-time employment, or perhaps employment of any kind.

c) In conditions where it's an employer's market (too many workers lusting after too few jobs) wages and benefits are driven down. I have a close friend who's a philosophy professor. Recently he got bumped off tenure track—not because his performance reviews were poor,  but because the university could get away with it. Now he's employed as adjunct faculty, where they pay him half as much for the same work and can avoid offering tenure. His future as a professor is murky.

3. Boomers are retiring
Social Security is running out of money, and it's scary contemplating if the government will be able to accommodate the bulge of Baby Boomers entering retirement age with fewer younger workers contributing to FICA. Can we count on that money being there when it's needed? As a Boomer myself, I'm questioning that.

 • • •

So what does this add up to? 

If we want to get ahead of the curve (rather than just take our chances on surviving being buffeted about by macro-instabilities) we need to be thinking about what we can do to take care of our own economic needs at the local level. We need to be thinking about how we can create fair exchanges that meet real needs and about which people feel good in the delivery.

I think this is going to mean:

o  Local resilience
We need to be engaging on this at the level of people we know, who understand that we are in this together. When economic exchanges are not faceless (such as buying a book through Amazon), it matters that both parties feel good about the exchange, because everyone depends on good relations and a solid reputation for repeat business. (Hint: it doesn't matter whether it's barter, working for wages, or offering a service—the principle remains the same.)

o  Value-based part-time work
People don't necessarily need full-time employment if commuting is minimized or eliminated, and barter substitutes for cash purchases. What people need is enough work, and work that they feel good about delivering—because its aligned with who they are, and what they want to be known for. Work like that is not so draining. People get out of bed in the morning looking forward to it.

o  A little help from our friends
We need to be thinking about how to help people start and succeed at local businesses—not just for their own economic viability, but to create jobs for non-entrepreneurs as well. Everywhere there are people who have learned to be successful in business and we need to harness that skill to help guide others in developing sound business plans, and to be savvy about managing money. We need to make the shift to think of additional local businesses as a strengthening of the local web, rather than as competition for limited local dollars. We either succeed together, or go down together.

In short, we need to be real communities.

Three-Legged Stools in Non-income Sharing Communities

In the clear majority of intentional communities (88-90%), members do not share income. In the overwhelming majority of those, the group takes a hands-off approach with respect to members' personal finances. So long as residents can cover their HOA dues, it's not the community's business. Or is it?

The point of an intentional community is to create a better quality of life for its members through high alignment with common values, through a greater degree of sharing, and through developing an enhanced sense of connection and neighborhood camaraderie. For some, it also a platform from which to do good work in the world—either by modeling a more just and sustainable culture, or by concentrating group resources so that a few individuals can do social change work on behalf of the whole.

Most communities hold sustainability as a common value, which is often translated as being in right relationship with the Earth (certainly a good thing). But it's more than that. It's also right relationship with each other, which is social sustainability. And it's also being in right relationship to the exchange of goods and services, or economic sustainability.

The main point of this essay is that sustainability is a three-legged stool, which does not tend to be stable when one of the legs is missing. Of the three, it's the economic leg that is most often short or wobbly, and that brings me back to the opening paragraph and the fact that most non-income-sharing communities—despite their being intentional about trying to create a better quality of life for their members—tend to ignore the economic component. Whoops!

So how do economics interweave with social and environmental sustainability? Glad you asked. In simple terms, economic sustainability encompasses people making a living by doing things that are aligned with their values and for which everyone involved in the exchange feels is fair (no one's been taken advantage of). This is necessary because it doesn't make much sense to try to meet all of your needs yourself. If your neighbor is a whiz at plumbing and you're a master gardener, it works better all around if she installs your shower and you supply her with carrots and potatoes.

But let's take this further. By living in community you're purposefully living more cooperatively, which means you can collectively own a riding lawn mower and a table saw, obviating the need for everyone to buy their own (or do without). That means you can attain a high quality life without forking over as many dollars (because you can leverage resources through sharing). That means you can either work fewer hours or choose employment that you enjoy more but doesn't pay as well: you're ahead either way. What's more, sharing equates with less resource consumption, which is good for the environment.

Building on this concept (less time spent doing work you don't enjoy), at the end of the day you're not as tired—either because you're working fewer hours or doing more satisfying work. That means you're more fun to be around, less reactive (more resilient), less inclined to have a couple stiff drinks to "unwind," and less likely to hole up in the den with a movie or zone out surfing the web. That means your social life has improved. 

Is it getting clearer how one kind of sustainability impacts another?

Almost all intentional communities wrestle with questions of ecological impact and how to navigate sticky social dynamics. How about strengthening that third leg?

Here's are some ideas of that might look like, to prime the pump: 
o  Budgets could include money set aside to capitalize a loan fund that could be used to help people afford the down payment to buy into the community.

o  The community could conceive of itself as an economic engine, thinking of how its property and facilities are a major asset that could be utilized more fully (without compromising the socially valued uses now in place) to support business ventures with a high value match—perhaps growing open-pollinated or heirloom vegetable seeds instead of lawn; renting the common house dining room on off nights for neighborhood events; devoting a couple of little-used rooms as co-office space for fledgling businesses—complete with high speed internet.

o  Members with entrepreneurial energy could form a support group that helps members create business plans, secure start-up funding, and develop jobs on site for those hoping to walk to work and save on wardrobe. Most communities have a number of people who would like part-time employment (10-20 hours/week) at home with flexible hours at decent wages. (Hint: communities are excellent candidates for flex-time and job sharing—two stay-at-home moms can share one job with the off-duty woman handling childcare for both) Further, community folks tend to be well educated and possess exceptional social skills. Surely the entrepreneurial whiz kids can turn that into a market advantage.

Part of the reason that groups tend to avoid economics is that the need doesn't touch all members. In particular, founders tend to have entrepreneurial talent (starting a business is fairly similar to starting a community) and thus are less likely to need help with their personal finances. Unfortunately, that's not necessarily true for the folks who come later. Not only is that hard to see right away, but it can be awkward focusing group attention on a need that only affects part of the group. Another reason is that it can be difficult for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs to play nice together (see The Entrepreneurial Dilemma for more on this).

I'm not saying that developing models of economic sustainability is easy, but I think they're essential, and have every bit as much right to group attention as the ecological and social. We need that stool to be stable!