Welcome to New Detroit, 2020: The 1,000-year, carbon-absorbing house with near-zero property taxes, and how you could have one – free – PART II

[Note: Yesterday's article described how to get a house that will last for 1,000 years, absorbs carbon, has zero heating, hot water, and electricity bills - free. Well, for the price of your labour for a year or so. This article is a thought experiment describing how Detroit and other Rust Belt cities can be rebuilt.]

The Founding of New Detroit

It started as a small movement; a few people with home building skills partnered with investors to build several homes and a small retail complex with professional offices and apartments above. The investors paid for the land – practically free in Old Detroit at the time – building materials, and a very low wage to the builders, who ended up with a mortgage-free home of their own after about a year-and-a-half.

Compressed Earth Block Homes Under Construction

The investors were mainly doctors and other professionals who wanted to put some of their cash into real estate for the sake of security, and some of them occupied the new offices. The builders who got in early took a leap of faith, because there weren’t many jobs in Detroit in those days. But they figured Detroit could recover with a bit of investment, and the land prices couldn’t be beat. So after all the initial buildings for the investors and builders were done, the builders decided to see if they could continue being builders.

They found some farmers and wannabe farmers and matched them with investors. The investors purchased some farmland and traded it to the farmers in exchange for a reliable supply of organic food. There were plenty of derelict farms in those days. The farmers also got a new house and outbuildings, including solar greenhouses, in exchange for supplying the builders with food for a period of time.

Over time, as the community grew, it started to become largely self-sustainable. Interlinking non-profit cooperatives were formed that agreed to purchase from each other and not import. One group started a small coop to make windows and doors for the new houses; another made cellulose insulation from scrap newspapers. A coop grocery sprang up, as did a furniture manufacturer, a soap maker, a brewery, and many other small businesses. Yet another arranged a deal between the farmers and a wind power company to put windmills on the farmland. The farmers got $10,000 per year for the use of the land, the energy coop was paid to install and maintain the windmills and infrastructure, and everyone got locally-produced electricity.

The Magic of Electricity

The availability of reliable electricity made possible electric streetcars, along with more coops to operate and manufacture them. As the price of oil continued to climb in economy-wrenching spikes and drops, other businesses were also attracted by the power. A steel micro-mill started up and was soon supplying not only the streetcar manufacturer, but also a coop making pots and pans, another one making boats, and several others.

Soon recycling and reuse operations started. Raw steel and aluminium was getting much more expensive and harder to find, so new coops collected used cans and bottles from people’s houses and businesses as their raw material. This turned out to be far more cost and energy-efficient than mining. In fact, coops paid to collect the ‘waste’ products of the households and businesses. Why dig through tons of rock in a remote location, then crush it and soak it with incredibly toxic chemicals to get enough aluminium for one can, when the resources are sitting in front of local houses?

As oil prices see-sawed ever upward, imports from China became progressively more expensive and eventually dried up. This allowed local manufacturing to re-establish itself, although it had also become difficult to get exotic materials so big screen TVs were not possible.

However, when the University of Michigan established a campus in New Detroit, a campus with specialities in biomimicry and cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, new designs for everything started to appear. Dental floss made from hemp – that went in the compost when used. A washing machine that the manufacturer insisted on taking back because of all the valuable metals it contained – steel, copper, aluminium. Now products were designed not to be thrown ‘away,’ but to be taken back by manufacturers.

Because fewer services were required from the municipality, taxes were lower. There were no sewer lines or roads to maintain, for example. Everything was compostable, reusable, or recyclable, so there was no need for trash collection or a landfill. The streetcar service was pay-as-you-go, as they had once been.

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Reality Check

Clearly, the New Detroit just described is nowhere near existing. The land and the possibilities are there. Whether we will take action before the cheap oil runs out – it is already running out – seems doubtful at this point, and the longer we wait the fewer options we will have.

We don’t live in that world, although as energy gets much more expensive there will be economic pressure to be more energy-efficient, and reusing and recycling are certainly that. For now, you’re going to have to pay for trash collection.

If we started now, we could build walkable communities with very convenient transit. Imagine a covered downtown (also called a “mall”), and the electric streetcars going right inside. Travellers are out of the weather from the time they board the streetcar.  If you don’t mind pulling a little cart of some sort when you buy groceries or larger items, or if you have things delivered, a walkable, car-free community is quite possible and has many advantages. We actually have some such communities, but we often don’t think of them that way. Resorts like Disneyworld, for example.

If you really want to cut your taxes, create walkable communities with no roads. The concept is hard for Americans and many Canadians to comprehend, because we’re so used to driving everywhere for everything that we can’t imagine any other way. Taxes would be needed for the walking/biking paths; do those right and they’ll last forever, too. And you won’t need taxes if you can find people willing to trade their labour making, maintaining, and plowing them for something valuable to them, say the harvest from all the fruit trees planted down every street.

How Much Do You Need to Live?

Now, how much do you need to live? Well, you have no mortgage, no car, and you negotiated lower property taxes with the city because you have no need for sewer lines or roads. So, not much. Food, clothing, entertainment, the odd bit of furniture (also locally made and built to last indefinitely) – what does this add up to in your life now? If you had no mortgage, no car (or car payment), no debt, and property taxes were under $50/month, how much would you need to live comfortably? The four-day work week is well within reach.

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Resources for this article

Previous articles showed how a collapse of society-as-we-know-it is quite likely, and what you should be doing to prepare. The ideal situation is something like that described above, where you are surrounded by an entire community and the security and other advantages that brings. As all efforts so far are foolish and wasteful attempts to simply defibrillate business as usual, you would be wise to do what you can to protect yourself. One way to do that is to accumulate knowledge in the form of real books that require no electricity to read.  Everything on the Internet requires electricity and stable networks. The Kindle is cool, but post-collapse will be useless.

From left-to-right: Back to Basics is chock full of traditional skills, from converting trees to lumber to raising chickens. Cradle to Cradle describes the new industrial paradigm of zero waste, where industry actually works as nature does and therefore leaves the environment richer rather than devastated. A Pattern Language is a classic; the authors travelled the world and discovered the commonalities that make a house a homes, and a collection of homes a community. Sufficient is another guide to improving your self-sufficiency. You may not need books on “traditional crafts” and self-sufficiency now, but in the event of a Depression or post-peak-oil, you will be glad to have them.