 
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 16:15:50 EDT
From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
Subject: option-to-buy
To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Message-Id: <4g42qB1w165w@hogbbs.scol.pa.us>
Organization: The Heart of Gold BBS, Lemont PA
Comments: Validated

(Here's another little piece of text-- a combination of notes-for-a
chapter and a letter to this mailist....)

Places, What they are and how to get them...
--------------------------------------------

The first step towards freedom is _place_. Finding a place in which your
body and selfhood can be secure, and come to enjoy happiness, is
something each of us will have to do.

We've all got to have a place to park the robot. It can be a prison
cell, or it can be a palatial mansion-- the organism will accept either,
and deal with it as best it can. It's up to our clevernes, our creative
edge brains, to find a place that empowers us maximally, and entraps us
in the Dominant Ratrace minimally. This is the first implacable test of
our cleverness and fitness-as-edgedwellers; do we have the brains and
power to find a supportive, nourishing place to live, and to turn it
into the optimal home?

.............


Virtual place--like this mailist, a virtual parlour, in which we discuss
rev/evolution, and strategies for freedom, and recipes for future
happiness.

Rented place-- relatively easy to get, relatively risky, short term, and
powerless, but sure as hell infinitely better than nothing.

Owned place-- Rather hard to get-- the best place to work, because you
can be sure all your efforts will accruue to your ultimate benefit-- you
are 'lord and master' of all you survey.

Allowed place-- Could be easy to get-- parents, friends, benefactors
provide a piece of land or a house, and says, "hey, you can live here
and do what you want til....". Nice work if you can get it.

Squatted place-- Just find a place and move your shit there and go to
work, assuming that you'll be forced out sooner or later, but maybe
it'll be later rather than sooner. This can work in the decaying areas
of cities, and may also work in the backwoods, or on federal or state
land.

Uncontested Place-- Maybe federal land claimed under the Mining Act,
maybe untouchable tax properties in the back boonies of places like
kentucky or new mexico, maybe on some island that is not considered full
time habitable, maybe in the outback of tasmania.


.............

Good Places to Have
-------------------

The Rural Community Site-- Organic food, privacy, the laidback country
life, and enough room to spread out, build buildings, and get several
businesses started and running.

    (and surrounding small properties, if possible, as buffer zones and
    more traditional private homes for associated teams and friends of
    the community-- strength in numbers, in terms of local government
    and relations with neighbors)

The Urban Community house(s)-- Places for community lifestyle while the
tribe-mates carry on conventional employment, or work in businesses that
require proximity to the major clusters of people. Ideally linked in a
type of parnership with a rural community, and regularly receiving
visits from the rural villages delivery truck, bearing organic food and
such products as printed shirts, home office paperwork to be delivered
in town, etc..

Storefront/apartments-- buildings in commercially zoned areas. A place
for small stores, offices, restaurants, private food/entertainment
clubs, and other profit making ventures, linked to the community effort,
and ideally also providing housing for a team that manages the
storefront businesses.

Light Industrial buildings-- for use in entrepreneurial ventures.

    (with integrated living space, possibly scofflaw in heavily
    regulated cities)

Performace and Event sites-- either small cafe' type places, or large
indooor or outdoor sites meant to support large crowds. These can be
either connected with a community living space (for instance, a coffee
shop club built in the backyard of an Urban Community household), or
unconnected (For instance, warehouses which can be used to host raves,
or private rural campgrounds which can be used to host various types of
festivals, eco-gatherings, etc.).

Rural Hermitages-- out in the boonies sites, ideally with fine natural
features, in which people could retreat for personal purposes, and at
which private meetings and events could be held.


.............


Rent With Option To Buy
-----------------------

I've decided on the Place-Getting strategy that I'm going to use in the
next three years to buy my next piece of land. I'm going to spend a year
looking around to find the best possible rent-with-option-to-buy deal on a
beaten-up small farm somewhere within a 40 mile radius of a major
university. (Presumably PSU)

Why rent with option to buy? Because it gives me control over a peice of
land faster than any other method possible to me right now.

I'm expecting to have several thousand+ dollars of usable savings at the
end of this year, and I have at minimum 15,000 dollars(+) in equity or
collateral in the form of the piece of land I currently own. This isn't
really all that much money-- certainly not nearly anough to get a
traditional bank mortgage, and not quite enough to try for an
owner-financing deal. But it is definitely enough to get a
rent-with-option-to-buy.

A three year rent/option agreement lets me live of the land for three
years, testing it for suitability, and looking for alternative better
pieces if this particular piece has hidden drawbacks.

And it gives me three years to assemble the 15,000 cash that might be
needed to make the actual purchase. In the meantime, If you've been wise
about the clauses and conditions of your option-to-buy, you can count
improvements to the land as part of the "down payment", and in a large
percentage of options, some percentage of the rent is accrued to the
down payment also.

What is an option-to-buy? Typically, it's a single page agreement that
basically says that in exchange for a payment, which varies from
hundreds to thousands of dollars, the owner of the land grants the
option-holder the right to buy the land at some specified price. The
option lasts for a specified time, typically from a month, to several
years. After this time is past, the owner can withdraw the right to buy
the land, and sell the land out from under you, if he chooses.

I'm looking for a deal in which I offer $1000 for a three year
rent-with-option-to-buy agreement (and will go to $3000 if necessary
{and possible} on 40 acres (+-15), hoping to pay $300 in rent, which
assumes a rather decrepit property, and a 'roughing it' house. I'd snap
up a better deal if a "motivated seller" (for 'motivated' read
'desperate') with an acceptable property was found. I'd try to get at
least 50% of the principal payment, and ideally 50% of the rent, to be
accrued to the down payment.

So, the principal payment, one years rent, and possible subsidiary
payments like land assessment, insurance maybe, who knows what else-- I
figure that would all add up to the $3-5000 I'm hoping to save this
year.

No doubt the whole thing is going to end up being an enormous bitch.
These types of things always are. But, I think I can realistically talk
about having a piece of land, on which to start building a small,
relatively secretive test-model community, in my legal possession by
spring of 1994, in a minimum success scenario.

(Then, this piece of land could be used as a site for a
school/church/office building devoted to teaching and supporting these
ideas. If I can organize the construction companies I control and
influence to build as-cheaply-as-possible the needed buildings here,
then I can multiply the equity value of the property, and establish a
firm home base an easy ten miles from state college and Penn State
University, with a bueatiful location near the county border on a major
little surburban-sprawl artery called whitehall road. Then find a
caretaker to live at the Pennsylvania Furnace site, while I, my lady,
and the proper team of committed, coupled venture-partners, live on and
develop the new Rent-with-option-to-buy site.

Maybe it's maudlin, but I really would prefer not to sell this piece of
land I have-- My house is very old and rather ramshackle, but the trout
stream in the front yard, the pond, swamp, forested hillside, and
gardens are plenty cool. Maybe I'm sentimental, but I hate to think of
the place stripped and lawned and tikkitakki housed and turned into just
another cookie cutter suburban estate.)


...................

Getting the Townhouse.
----------------------


(In this case, townhouse doesn't mean a little mass produced
"apartment-with-stairs" row type of townhouse-- it means, literally, a
house in town. In this case, the town is State College, Pa, home of PSU,
where I am located. This means that this could well be a 'cityhouse' for
other people, depending on where you live... ;-).   )

The other system I'm willing to invest some money into is the
aqquisition of a good deal on the rental of a house in the town of state
college that can be used as a (1) home for several of the teammembers in
this area, (2) a 'homebase' for me and other team-mates, a second home
while we are in town, and (3) an office and business-place from which
various entrepreneurial and educational projects can be run.

If I have the savings I expect, I would be willing to supply up to a
thousand dollars to get a good solid rental package on a suitable house,
assuming that the right essential core of house members, who would have
to pay rent reliably, can be found. ( I simply cannot be swayed into
funding any lesser attempt-- I've seen so many collective house
disasters, usually triggered by money problems, to make me extremely
hardheaded about this.)

The primary structure of this house would be defined by some type of
constitution, bylaws, and in the rental contracts signed by the
teammembers/boardmembers. I expect that the design and writing of these
papers too be something i work on in the next few months, as a needed
part of the book I'm writing on the subject of starting communities. So,
I may be posting this constitution/etc on this list, looking for
comments, criticisms, etc.

This reminds me-- some years ago, I thought to myself that a shareware
program devoted to designing collective house paperwork, from rental
agreements to rules lists to work schedules, might be a simple but
useful "expert program" that would be useful both to the community
effort and to the hundreds of thousands of students and fringe people
who live in collective house situations. This same shareware program
still needs to be assembled, and maybe distributed as part of the
software collection of whatever organizations or mail-order businesses
we create. I'll be writing the text-- does anyone want to try writing
the appropriate software?

Now, I understand that this is basically a "local culture' project, so
i'll not go into any detail here. As It proceeds, if it proceeds, I'll
write more about it.

If you think you want to be one of the "pillars" of the household, send
me email.

...................



The "Campground Community" trick...
-----------------------------------


I've found a loophole in the guantlet of zoning/building code/sanitation
regulations that i think should be heavily explored.

As it turns out, private campgrounds are fairly lightly regulated.
Almost all rural zoning laws allow them across a variety of zoned uses--
which, in plain english, means you can start one on almost any old farm.
Building codes are applied very laxly-- only "primary structures", like
the "main office", campground store, etc, are expected to fulfill the
regulations for permanent buildings-- most other structures would fall
under either outbuilding codes (like for barns or toolsheds) or in the
category of 'temporary shelter', over which the counties have no
jurisdiction.

So, all we have to do, to have a cheap cheap bottom dollar community, is
buy a piece of land and run it as a private campground. This means that
everyone _but the caretakers_ can only live on the land eleven month's
out of every year. That's right, for at least one month a year you have
to take a vacation and go live somewhere else. Say on a mexican beach,
or biking through europe. Awwww, what a shame. ;-)

Using this trick, we could house the whole community in lowcost
structures including yurts, tipis, domes, trailers, gypsy wagons,
busses, and possibly even hogan earth lodges or other truly primitive
shelters. We build water systems, electrical systems as needed, and
various types of bath and toilet facilities, and get to work developing
the other aspects of community.

A yurt or tipi manufacturing company could be set up on the campground,
providing many of the camps used within the campground, and, hopefully,
producing a saleable product for export from the campground community.

A business selling twelve volt equipment and solar charging systems,
which served as a "buyers club" for people within the community, but
sold for the best possible retail profit from buyers from outside the
community, would also be an obvious choice. (Because we might not get a
ton of walk-in business, an agressive mail-order approach might be best
for this business.)

Also, a business manufacturing compact composting toilets, or similar
sorts of things....

All of these together, in fact, could be integrated into one big mail
order catalog that sold yurts, solar electric systems, composting
toilets, and, say, solar powered computing systems (along with whatever
else we dream up...).
--
We might be able to make the following deal-- we find some rich type of
person, say, a guilty yuppie, or some silver fox looking for a "good
investment that does the earth good at the same time...", and we sell
them on the campground idea. "Buy a piece of land for us, and we'll run
it as a 'organic farm campground' (or other suitable description) for
you. We'll get twenty families to buy camping contracts from you for
fifty dollars a month, and you'll collect $1000 a month to cover your
mortgage and leave you a tidy 300 dollar a month profit. We get our
community land, you get an eventual 100% plus profit on your investment,
everybody wins. All you have to do is sign here and...." ;-)

I'm planing on doing more research on this in the near future, but the
"campground community" looks like a very practical plan for
accomplishing our 'place-finding' in the shortest possible time.

Land could even be rented, and, provided that we spell out our
intentions clearly in the rental agreement, we could set up the
rudiments of community within a year. By making all the systems
relatively portable, and of course with the portable hoousing, if the
situation with the rented property became difficult, the campground
community could move to another rented site. Digging up shallowly buried
but insulated water pipes and electrical and phone wiring, and
dismantling such structures as bathhouses and composting outhouses,
would be a fairly manageable job for a small crew with some rented
trucks and equipment.

......................

I know most of the folks here aren't in the land-buying phase, and for
them some of this type of talk may be totally uninteresting. Don't let
my single-mindedness inhibit you from talking about the ideas that
excite and motivate you.

We're on the edge of history. There are no easy roads through the
frontier. Make your best choice, and go with it. Later, Bill



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