Moulin Revolution overview and breakdown

Project Overview and Concept Exploration

Begins with providing affordable housing, property ownership, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers.

Becomes a network of live/work facilities with a focus on sustainable entrepreneurialism, accessible autonomy, and community outreach.

These facilities function as socio-economic labs - they are on paper corporations, to access any advantages, protections, and loop-holes available to the corrupt institutions currently running the economy. They target the large corporations, ultimately seeking to end them. They produce businesses such as restaurants that grow all their own food, and doctors that are paid for by the apartment complex to provide medical care to residents. 

Additionally, theses facilities provide a new way of life, in a format that allows for autonomy, but also allows for successful participation in the current economy... where all the money is.

They also attempt to alleviate the time crunch problem for the middle class, wherein managing a household and raising a family is actually three or four full time jobs.

As such, the facilities are designed to grow into these large businesses/institutions:

SCHOOL.

A k-college school on 3 campuses, wherein the school functions as a microcosm of the economy as a whole for the purpose of study: school gardens provide cafeteria food; school woodshops produce school furniture; economy classes figure out how the school budget can afford the water, fertilizer, metal, and wood.

3rd graders have classes in the garden learning the biome and doing the weeding; 8th graders are each growing 3ftX3ft gardens and helping in the large garden; 11th graders are cross-pollenating and designing green housing and aquaponic systems; bachelor students are splicing plant genes in the lab. But by then some of the students have stopped being involved in the garden, and are making replacement hinges for all the school doors as metal shop homework or squeezing enough money out of the school budget for a big homecoming event.

By the third campus, students are living on site, so there is housing to manage. Student store and cafeteria provide economic interactions; the whole of our socio-economic society done small for study and practice, under a single administration instead of our current system of a scholastic career being broken up into mismatched administrations, which is a disservice to our students.

ALT-MART

A facility meant to compete with Target and Walmart and Whole Foods. It grows from the live/work facility kitchen and meal-plan set up. Alt-mart features a permanent farmer’s market, supplemented with an onsite garden/nursery. There is an onsite industrial kitchen and restaurant that uses overstock from the farmer’s market and ingredients from the garden, possibly purchasing all unsold produce from the farmer’s market at a discount. Restaurant offers prepared foods for sale to the public, kitchen processes overstock into consumer goods like ketchup, frozen microwaveable breakfast burritos, and canned corn. Bakery also, of course.

Facility also features a tool-library with a 3-d printer that can print any tools not on the shelves. 

Additionally features local tailoring and a second hand clothing store. The local tailors get access to all the second-hand pieces for use in making their own clothes to sell onsite, as well as some facility-bought cloth and onsite machinery (sewing machines to textile machines like tuffters, gins, and looms).

Toy aisle is franken-toy land, where in-house creative DIYers take second hand toys and make whole new toys out of them.

Electronics section is mostly repair, and offers lessons in repair.

Book-nook and greeting card section features local/community writers.

And so on. The goal is to offer an alternative to the big one-stop-shop stores, with a focus on local/community sourcing. 

CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

This business grows out of building maintenance and groundskeeping into a landscaping company, then into a construction company. It should be the company used by the network of facilities for any renovations and repairs, so it should grow quite large.

COMMUNITY-OWNED CREDIT UNION (and LAW OFFICE)

Basically a non-profit bank, that offers community outreach for people who need help with budgeting, would like to learn about mortgages and homeownership, etc. Grows out of a Community Support Center that also offers community office space and legal advice.

FIRST STOP HOSPITAL

Not a full hospital, at least not at first, this should just be a few medical professionals that can answer common questions, provide emergency medical response, and assess medical conditions. Not for treatment so much as to find out what kind of treatment you need and who to get it from. Where first-time parents bring their babies when they’re not sure if they need o bring their baby to an emergency room. Honestly, medical care is the hardest part of this whole thing and I'm not sure if it's going to be possible or what to do about it.

CATERING AND EVENTS COMPANY

This is what get’s the ball rolling, the catering folds into the care-taking positions within the facilities, and the events company later become basically the arts entertainment and media/information division. There's a traveling circus element. It's fun.

These projects can possibly culminate in a whole large, sustainable city built from the ground up, that I have outlined. It involves building a large hill and two small lakes. I am happy to talk a lot more about that, but it clearly necessitates all the above pieces and more.

OKAY, so much for the overview. Let’s start at the beginning.

The loan is for 2 million dollars, for a property of 1 million and another million in building costs.

25 people are shareholders in the building and the mortgage, split evenly amongst them. The group is responsible for any defaulters. This means that essentially, each person has roughly a $77,000 mortgage, and if one of the people defaults, their 77k debt is split evenly among the remaining 24 people, which means each person now has just about a $79,000 mortgage. This lowers the risk for the lender considerably, while remaining manageable for the group even if several of 25 default; plus you can always try to find someone to join the group and assume the debt of the defaulter. (There's a lot more I've put into this, about buy-outs and all kinds of things, but it's not relevant at this juncture)

To alleviate issues of zoning, permits, sewer system upgrade permissions, etc, the group partners with the city on surrounding infrastructure - so, part of the construction costs are earmarked for re-paving the surrounding streets, or installing new street lights, or re-designing a busy intersection, or whatever needs doing in that part of the city. The group offers to pay for, say, the cost of materials, so the city gets to save a lot of money and still use its regular departments and workers. This will only increase the property value and can be seen as an investment.

So, 25 people live in the facility, which is 50 bedrooms, an industrial kitchen, gymnasium style bathing facilities, and a greenhouse. 15 of them pay money toward the loan. The other 10 are facility/community caretakers, and they pay their debt through labor to the group, providing a meal plan, housekeeping, laundry, maintenance and groundskeeping.  The 25 available rooms are filled with minimum wage renters. For a home loan of 2 million dollars, the monthly cost of a ten year mortgage comes out to 20 thousand dollars per month. With 40 people paying, this comes to $500 per month per person in mortgage payments plus property tax, which I had trouble figuring, and finally just used a straight 2%, which is about an additional $75 per month per person. That's a base rent of $575.

But this isn't a new kind of housing, this is a new kind of living.

So for one thing, the building is designed as blocks of bedrooms and a centralized industrial kitchen, shared bathing facilities (gym style) and various communal spaces like dining, office, etc. Sort of a mix between a dorm and a hotel. This is important, but not what I'm going to talk about just yet.

The 10 caretakers are going to provide a meal plan, housekeeping & laundry, and facility maintenance & improvement. So they are going to receive room and board for this labor, but they are also going to need payment; a stipend of about 700 dollars a month. And hey, we're going to make rent and everything all one payment, so we're going to throw in all the utilities too. Meal plan for all 50 people can be done for 4k per month. Utilities are gonna run close to the same. The stipend for the caretakers is another 7k. Add about 1k as a fund for supplies and maintenance costs. It all comes to about $16,000, Paid by 40 people is about $400 each, plus the base rent, all rounded up for more funding comes to an even thousand dollars per person per month. For a full service, all inclusive lifestyle covered by one low bill.

Now, you can get this price down in several ways. You can lower the mortgage by going somewhere like Clearlake or Windsor. You can build a facility for 38 people instead of 26 for nearly the same amount of money and then the price per person goes way down. But lets use Oakland, 2 million in property and building costs, 25 people, and $1,000 per month per person for the total package.

Oakland minimum wage is $12.25 which comes to just over $1,500 per month after tax. So this plan would allow you to live pretty well for your money, especially as a thousand bucks a month is well below average for rent around here. With maintenance and a dedicated building fund, the facility will improve slowly over time. As minimum wage employees get raises and promotions, residents can, if they wish, move out and sublease to a new round of minimum wage workers. After the mortgage is paid off, the building becomes a source of residual income, or can be sold outright with the proceeds divided among the 25 people. This allows minimum wage workers to become property owners, build equity, helps provide retirement, all that.

Ideally, what happens is, they get together another 2 to 5 million dollars on their own (via one of several businesses that I've planned out how to grow from this group/facility) and they finance another nearly identical project, only with themselves as the bank (on a 30 year 2 million dollar mortgage, the bank profits an additional 1.4 million bucks). So the second group gets all of the same opportunities that the first group did, and the first group gets all the benefits the the bank used to. Furthermore, two or three groups working cooperatively can provide further services, like daycare and shuttle rides... All of which will encourage this format propagates among the people while keeping more of the money circulating among those that are starting off as our lowest earners.

And you can do other things - for instance you could leave two rooms open for outreach. So you run the same format loan, but you leave two slots open and everyone splits it, as if there were two defaulters, which makes very little difference split 38 ways. A food budget for 48 people could easily absorb two extra people, as could the utilities. Then you provide those two rooms, complete with food and laundry and everything, for free, on a semi-temporary basis for people like women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, reformed felons, homeless people with children... 

You can even rotate two people at a time through the caretaker position as a work re-hab. As they re-acquire work habits and references they can get a job outside the facility, which puts them on six month timeline - as a caretaker, they receive a stipend, then, employed elsewhere, their room and board are still covered for six months, which allows them to save enough to move out with a decent nest egg). 

The point is you can have the facility very easily absorb the costs of room and board for two or four people, to use for outreach.

And the goal is to have as much as possible taken care of onsite. You want someone with a sewing machine. You want someone who’s good at repairing bikes. You want a garden, a greenhouse, a fish farming pool, a couple of goats and some chickens....

By 50 people you can fit families into the plan real easy, but the more people you add, the less the end-point benefit, or, the more you have to split any gains in your investment. For this reason, I don't think I'd want to do a facility of more than about 50.

At 50 people though... if you can still do the property and construction for 2 million, ten caretakers and 40 payers means you can keep the same costs, with each person paying the same as the 26 person version, but you can pay off the loan in TEN YEARS. If you continue that same payment plan into a trust, then in another ten years you’ll have enough to finance another building, ALL FOR ONLY MINIMUM WAGE.

Ideally, you go in with 25 people as the shareholders, and another 25 random people renting the other rooms, and then when you get your second building, you move the original 25 into the new building, and you offer a mortgage for ownership of the old building to a new 25 people, who form a cooperative network with the second building.

There's a lot A LOT more to this, but this is the bare-bones how it works part. And, scarily, as far as I can tell, it really does work.

That's the first third. The second third is all about building some of these networked groups into a new way of life in this country, but it's a little more.. speculative.

SO. The two buildings I mention represent two stages of the greater project. Full Service Living, and Full Service Living Proffessional (hereafter FSL, and FSL Pro)

In the first stage, you have 10 caretakers providing full service living to 40 paying individuals, most of whom make minimum wage. FSL is basically getting as much of your life as possible handled with a single low bill, something similar to living in a good hotel. The caretakers additionally seek to offer this service to middle class households - these homes already hire a house cleaner, a gardener, use a dry-cleaner, order delivery food, so they are prime clients. As middle class households become clients, the caretakers need more people to handle the work load, and the other people living in the facility quit their minimum wage jobs and work for the FSL company. This will earn the group profits as a whole while paying the individuals close to $25 an hour. THIS allows the second building to be much nicer.

With a second, much nicer building, the 25 people move in, and they find 25 new renters from higher up the economic food chain. These folks need to earn at least 35k a year and include people from a specific list of professions. This new group of 25 shall be reffered to hereafter as the tenants. The rent agreement is unique:

The 25 tenants pay about 2k per month each for the same package, the FSL company from the first building provides all the housekeeping, meal plan, etc. The tenants also agree to pay one third of any increase in their wages, up to a cap, with the money going toward renovations, improvements, and additional services and amenities. This means that if you are making 35k you earn 3k a month, which means you pay 2/3 of your income to the facility (many people spend this much on rent and food). If you double your income, you now earn 6k per month. Your rent package would go up by 1/3 of your additional income, or one thousand dollars, and you would still have an extra two thousand dollars per month of personal discretionary income. You would have started out paying 2/3 of your income, but now you’d be paying only half your income. Your building improves, your life improves, but you’ll always be able to afford it. Additionally, the staff is motivated to really give you all the support they can, as a well supported individual is more likely to have monetary success. And one more thing.

Tenants either pay an additional 500 bucks a month in money, OR they offer $500 of their professional services to residents of the facility (this can be out of the 2k rent, or on top of it, depending). Unclaimed time must be made available to the surrounding public for free. So, say a paralegal values her time at $50 dollars an hour for qualified legal advice (such as, do I need a lawyer for this? what kind of lawyer do I need? What is this legal process going to look like?). The 50 residents only use an hour this month, so something like 9 appointments should be made available to the surrounding community for free - the facility staff will handle outreach (letting the community know of the offer, flyers etc) will handle making the appointments according to her availability, and will provide the facility’s communal office space to hold them in.

These programs allow businesses to grow in a very low risk environment. Let’s look at a day care worker.

She’s a classroom assistant at a day care, going to school part time to finish her teaching degree. She offers residents hours of baby sitting as her $500 service. As she earns more money, the facility can renovate a space that can sometimes function as a play room for kids. No longer going to school, she is earning more money, the facility hires a permanent babysitter or two, and she manages them. Free to residents, they accept local kids for a reasonable fee. Low cost good quality day care becomes available to the neighborhood. She’s class lead at a good school now, making more money, so the facility can afford to hire classroom assistants and the baby-sitting /  daycare starts offering after-school programs to older children, well on its way to being a small private school, with our tenant running it.

Similarly, restaurants and construction companies grow out of offering facility residents goods and services.

It’s worth noting that in the second building, the original 25 members live for free and each receive 1k per month in residual income.

To recap the ideal situation here: 

25 people live in a nice 50 bedroom facility for free. They own the building, and they own a business in a neighboring facility. Their cooking, cleaning, laundry, are all done for them for free, their rent and utilities and food are all paid for. Plus they’re earning a thousand dollars a month each in residual income. Their meals are largely made from the facility’s garden and aquaponics greenhouse, which includes a fish-farming pool, a few goats, a cow or two, and some chickens. Living with them in the facility is their lawyer, their doctor, their electronics expert, etc. They’re all part owners in their own non-profit bank/credit union, and there is an onsite day care, gym, and communal workshop. The group offers outreach programs to the surrounding community: low cost high quality day care, legal advice, semi-temporary room and board to women fleeing abusive relationships, disabled veterans, and the homeless (especially those with children). They are an active part of an ongoing socio-economic program designed to give low-income housing, property ownership, retirement options, and upward mobility to minimum wage workers.

The 25 people achieve all of this in twenty years to forty years, starting with nothing more than entry level jobs and this master plan.

From there, growth continues. More buildings are offered to more low income earners. More facilities means more services, amenities, cooperative power, a stronger micro-economy. Political influence also increases with membership...

Eventually, you can take all these businesses and facility/communities, and go build a whole city, which looks a little like this:
You go out in the middle of wherever. You dig two GIANT holes. You take the dirt from the holes and you build a nice big hill. You fill the holes with water and you have two lakes. Now you have a nice place people want to live, nestled between the lakes, under the hill.
You regulate everything for sustainability, design it from the ground up. It straight costs money to live in the city, instead of rent. No one is homeless or goes hungry. Regulation and organization for sustainability as a whole city addresses the fact that existence is always interlocked issues. For example: 
Grey water. In this city, only approved cleansers are allowed for sale or use (and the city provides one. Because the city provides it, it has to be cheap and easy, which means that there is always room for improvement, or, a business selling better cleansers for more money. But no one will ever go without one available, even if they are broke). SO, no bleach down the drain. So you can take the grey water of the city, and dump it into a created creek/river, which starts full of rocks, then pebbles, then sand (a natural filtration process) and ends up in the first lake. In the first lake there are fish farming and bi-valve farming, which filters the water (especially bi-valves like fresh water muscles, which feed by straining the water through organic filters). And it is exposed to Sun. The second lake is recreational, and the city pulls its water from the second lake through its combination water purification facility / power plant. The power plant uses a steam turbine. We simply run that steam through a charcoal filter, and re-condense it into molecularly clean water for municipal use; this uses our existing power generator, instead of requiring massive amounts of additional power.
When the city population doubles, half of them build a city next door and live there.

It's worth noting, that, aside from the first two facilities (and then probably the first of the cities, if that happens) I don't need or want to be involved. As it replicates into more and more facilities, the baseline should remain: "here is the format by which minimum wage workers can own property and grow wealth in a way that allows them more control over their lives". Three or four facilities in, some of them will probably just focus on the building management, ownership, and turnover, with each group acquiring a second, nicer building, and then giving the first building over to a new group (at a profit that will be denied the banks).

I don't want to tell people how to live or what to do, I want to give them tools and templates, to improve their own lives, whatever that looks like to them.

Anyway, I can never get the whole picture of any of this out in one go, but I've spent a lot of time on all the details which, as you can tell, are innumerable.

It addresses the whole tangled set of problems. You have to help high population areas, but also go out to the middle of the country. You have to help low income earners and people in poverty, but also our middle class is struggling. You have to do things that effect education, infrastructure, ocean management, industrialized food production, population density/overcrowding  issues, helps prevent homelessness, creates better jobs for workers of big box stores while providing affordable more sustainable alternatives to their customers... 

I think this plan does all that and more.