[GJM] Homesteading and finance (was Re: [Finance-Welfare] Revised Opening Statement attached)

[robert searle]

For BE Lovers Only...This came from the John Watkins
forum.


R. Searle



--- John Watkins <johnw at humanemp.org> wrote:

> At 1:14 PM -0400 6/8/07, Joatlas at aol.com wrote:
> 
> >More than 100 years after the 1862 Homestead Act,
> cities began passing their own urban homesteading
> laws. These policies were a response to the flight
> of private investment from the city to the suburbs,
> which led to a swift increase in housing
> abandonment. In the early 1970s, for example, city
> officials in Baltimore set up a trial program that
> sold abandoned houses for a nominal fee to
> homesteaders who agreed to rehabilitate them.
> Seeking help to repair the growing inventory of
> vacant, federally-owned houses created by widescale
> foreclosures, big-city mayors successfully pressured
> Congress to enact a federal homesteading bill in
> 1974. Both the federal homesteading program and its
> local counterparts were poorly funded. Only a
> handful of the vacant buildings were occupied and
> repaired, most of them by middle-income families. 
> 
> Part of the reason that only some of them were
> converted was that those who needed them lacked the
> personal capital or "credit-worthiness" to do the
> work necessary. A certain measure of cooperation was
> also necessary to take a large apartment building
> and rehabilitate it.
> 
> With our human empowerment paradigm, there are
> empowerment guides who help their clients make plans
> for their own future--and who can organize
> cooperative efforts such as those needed to
> rehabilitate these buildings. But, most importantly,
> HE provides a system of empowerment loans which
> means the necessary capital can be easily available
> to finance such cooperative efforts.
> 
> My sense is that this type of cooperative effort and
> personal investment leads to the kind of pride
> needed to make and sustain the rehabilitation of
> such efforts.
> 
> Beyond that, it also makes cooperative efforts
> feasible with regard to new developments.
> 
> If such a program were in place, the tendencies
> toward gentrification might not have been the marker
> of the rehabilitation of old neighborhoods.
> -- 
> For information about how a rational human
> empowerment
> system works send a blank email to 
> potential at humanemp.org
>    
> 
> 



	
	
		
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