An Ancient Trick to Make Landlords Disappear From Your City 💨
For more than 1,000 years, people have been dismantling shelter-hoarding
When it comes to sheltering human beings, there is the wretched current model and the model that actually works.
#1: The Current Money-Worshiping Model:
Greedy people (investors) refuse to work at creating new useable wealth for others
They instead decide to hoard property
And use said property to extract rents from workers on the not-so-subtle threat of homelessness
They then compound their profits to hoard more properties
All while voting for corporatists on the tacit agreement they’ll constrict supply so house prices and rent prices rise
Horrible, right? This Mammonomics Model financializes human shelter, skyrockets house prices and rent prices for all, incentivizes supply constriction, and guarantees more debt, bankruptcies, housing hardship, higher cost of living, and homelessness.
Then there is Option #2, what I like to call the Christonomics Model, since it takes its inspiration from biblical economics:
People decide to actively reject their inner greed and instead practice gratitude and contentment, while acknowledging that human ownership of what was once common (land) is a very demented thing to believe.
Neighborhoods, churches, communities, networks, denominations, guilds, co-ops, charities, foundations, trusts, towns, cities, counties, or states build hyper-affordable, human-sized, not-for-profit dwellings.
People in need of shelter get to live in these dwellings rent-free (just pay their own heat/electricity/etc) and are encouraged to voluntarily donate money and/or time to a not-for-profit fund to help build more homes for others.
Unlike the Mammonomics Model, the Christonomics Model de-commodifies human shelter, lowers house prices and rent prices for all, increases supply, plummets cost of living, evaporates debt, eradicates homelessness, and frees up untold hours of human time currently lost to land-lorder enslavement.
Can you hear the reactionary, pearl-clutching, money-worshipping critics?
IMPOSSIBLE!
Yeah, no.
Not impossible.
British Christians have been using this model for 1,088 years.
A brief history of almshouses
The first recorded almshouse was established in the city of York around 936 AD by King Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great.
As the story goes, Athelstan crushed the Vikings at Brunanburgh, and on his trip home he passed through York and saw tons of homeless people, so he gave an endowment to build an almshouse — the word “alms” comes from the Greek for compassion — to shelter the elderly, sick, and poor.
These compassion houses were built by kind people thinking on a thousand-year horizon.
In fact, there are still almshouses from the year 990 that have been sheltering people for more than a millennium!
Here are some of my favorite almshouses:
Collectively, these thousands of almshouses have provided millions of years of shelter to people in need, without the nonsense of decades of indentured servitude to land-lorders and bankers.
Think of how much more efficient society would be if we weren’t all paying rents and interest. We’d have so much more money to spend on goods and services to improve our well-being, maximize employment, and build more homes for others.
Sadly, greed rules everything around us now.
Gorgeous British almshouses continued to rise at a staggering pace until roughly the end of the Victorian era, when money-worship became the official religion of Britain and the West.
The future of almshouses
Today, more than 36,000 Britons still live in almshouses built long ago.
Ironically and infuriatingly, because of their beauty and quality, just as many almshouses have been turned into luxury second homes and Airbnbs.
But unsurprisingly, wherever there remains a higher density of almshouses, the area’s house and rent prices are generally lower.
My wife and I live in the 17th most affordable postcode in the nation. And surprise surprise, my county happens to have 1,700 almshouses, more than any other per capita in the nation.
And it makes sense — if smart communities build at-cost shelter, poor banksters can’t extract interest and house-hoarding land-lorders can’t extract rent and have to go get real jobs or practice their blood-sucking elsewhere.
Clearly, our civilization needs to build almshouses again.
Hundreds of millions of them.
Landlorder profits and banker profits are THE reason why housing is so expensive, the bottom 99% are experiencing housing hardship, and homelessness is skyrocketing in nearly every city in the nation.
We need groups of people — neighborhoods, churches, communities, networks, denominations, guilds, co-ops, charities, foundations, trusts, towns, cities, counties, or states — to revive the ancient practice of building hyper-affordable, human-sized, not-for-profit dwellings.
No investors needed or wanted.
As history clearly shows, the best way to flush greedy people out of local economies is by introducing Christian generosity.
But are Christians willing to divest their RRSPs and ISAs and 401ks to do it?
If people started almshouse trusts, would Christians give?
Or is homelessness tolerated by the 21st century church?
Jared A. Brock is the director of documentaries about slavery and trafficking and the author of a book about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.