Moulin Noir Explained
Imagine: you live in a large renovated industrial building. You only pay one bill - rent, garbage, electricity, phone plan, water, internet, even food - all one single monthly payment, which is low enough to be affordable on minimum wage.
You have a single room, no private apartment kitchen or bathroom, but the bathrooms are like those in a very nice gym, not only do they have private shower stalls, but there’s a sauna. There’s a food plan like you might find at a college (already included in your rent payment) so you never have to cook dinner, but you’re free to use the industrial kitchen if you want to make something.
Importantly, you don’t have to clean. Or cook. Never scrub a toilet or wash a dish again. There’s even laundry service. Already included in you rent.
Speaking of which, your rent is actually the mortgage, and when it’s up, you and the other people you live with will own the building together, which immediately cuts your costs of living nearly in half, and has other benefits and possibilities.
All doable on minimum wage.
Not only all that, but the community is designed to create better paying jobs that grow into alternatives to current corrupt and broken institutions, creating ethical, sustainable, public-owned banks, schools, grocery stores, clothing lines…
This is a little like trying to explain what a cool idea a computer is by describing how to physically build each component, please bear with me. Also, I did the initial budgeting for this nearly ten years ago, and when I checked it a couple months ago, a lot of the costs are different because of inflation and other factors so I’m in the middle of re-conceptualizing some details of the budget right now. But this is the whole plan in as much detail as I can force myself to put in words -- after a couple decades of conceptualizing I have a LOT more I could say about it, but this should be enough to understand what I’m trying to do.
There is a kind of financing sometimes called a solidarity loan - the concept is you loan an amount of money to a group and they are all responsible for each other’s payment. For example, if you loan one thousand dollars to ten people, they are each responsible for paying back $100. If one of the people defaults on the loan, the other nine people split their payment among them, so now they are each responsible for paying back $111 instead of $100, which is still a reasonable amount to be able to pay back. Additionally it encourages a support network. For example, if the person is defaulting because they lost their job, there are nine people with a vested interest in helping them find employment. This loan structure was popularized in Bangladesh and used by banks in India and Germany, and a few million people here in the United States currently have this style of loan - which has a repay rate of around 98%, while the common home loan for a mortgage has a repay rate of around 97%, so it has an acceptable risk factor for banks.
Now, let’s talk about our society for a second. Tribal people in difficult environments like the Amazon or the Kalahari typically spend about 20 hours a week “working”. But a lot of what is counted in that work tally would fall under the designation of “chores” for us -- acquiring and preparing food, repairing homes, etc. And currently our public faces the fact that paying for and managing a two person household (especially one with children) is often a 120+ hour proposition, even for the middle class. This is untenable. Leveraging group dynamics can solve some of this. For example, it is cheaper and more efficient to heat one larger building with ten people in it than it is to heat five separate buildings housing 2 people each. Similarly, they can make good use of a single tool kit rather than five fully stocked toolboxes, and eggs for ten costs less per person than eggs for two.
When deciding on a group size, the number of people in a single “tribe” (or more properly a “band”) is appealing, because humans have spent most of our existence working with that size of social group; starting with a group that size is utilizing parameters we are predisposed to work well within.
So we’re looking at between 15 and 100 people, or, very close to 50. When I ran the initial budget increasing to 60 was optimal. However, that is a LOT of people to organize and structure a loan around, so I thought perhaps two groups of 30 working together. This became two groups of 28 for reasons I will get into later. Group A is on the loan, Group B is simply participating members of the public.
So you buy a building. You spend half the home loan on the property and half on renovating it -- this is heavily simplified; I have researched both property values and building costs, as well as mortgage rates, and there are variables to be accounted for, and the not-insignificant matters of down payments and zoning laws. Currently the plan is to work with a municipality and grant writers on some of these issues, as the relevant part of the plan is to provide low income housing by renovating currently un-used industrial buildings and rezoning them as mixed use. Therefor cities might be convinced to give assistance as part of a low-income housing initiative, for example by waiving property taxes, cosigning with the bank, or matching funds for the downpayment. Whole essays could be written about this aspect alone. Moving on.
You’ve got 28 people on the loan, Group A, you build the facility with 60 rooms, and you move another 28 people in, Group B. The entire cost of living is bundled as a single “rent” payment. I ran a budget for everything from garbage service (using estimates from similar sized apartment complexes on landlord forums) to property tax (which is somewhere between 1% and 2% of the property value depending on where you are -- I used 2%) A lifetime of restaurant and catering work plus a quick check in with college meal plans informed my food budget. Group service plans and bulk purchasing are just some of the ways this community design lowers the cost of living is lower per person. Though members would have to still buy their own clothes and personal toiletries (and theoretically their employer is providing health care but I’m looking into group rates for that too). These things aside, the single “rent” payment includes almost the whole cost of living: meal plan, electricity, water, garbage, phone, internet, a building maintenance fund, car insurance and gas for a community shuttle... and something called a caretaker stipend.
So in this community there are ten people called caretakers who do not pay rent, and in fact are paid by the community. These are the people who are making the food for the meal plan, they are providing the laundry service, they are doing the cleaning and building maintenance. This is part of the reason the building is not apartments, but is organized as private rooms with communal facilities, circumventing a work load that would otherwise include cleaning 30 bathrooms and 30 kitchens. Remember, part of the solution we are looking for is the way each person in our current society does an extra 15 to 20 hours of “chores” after their full time job, and we have to engineer for caretaker efficiency.
This means not only have we thus created a lower cost of living that is more manageable on minimum wage, but additionally nobody has to come home after a hard day’s work and do laundry or cook etc. Days off are real days off. Quality of life is being addressed. People have more time for school, personal projects, recreation, etc. And because the caretakers live in the same facility, they participate in the same benefits. A caretaker completing a day of cooking food for the meal plan does not have to get off work and clean their home, and a caretaker who spent a shift doing laundry and cleaning does not have to get off work and cook themselves food.
So we have 10 caretakers, and 46 paying residents. The total costs of the community when divided by 46 instead of 50 are not significantly different, which allows four places to be made available as an outreach program, allowing the community to offer semi-temporary room and board to, for example, homeless veterans, or women fleeing abusive relationships. This is why the numbers are structured around two groups of 28 instead of two groups of 30. And two groups instead of one allows low income housing to be available without having to engage fully in the greater project, increasing accessibility and allowing flexibility as people come and go.
I’ve done a lot of situational exploration, for example, the “rent” breaks down into two categories, “room” (which includes the mortgage payment, property tax and building maintenance) and “board” (which includes everything else). Therefore if somebody moves a partner into their room with them, the extra person would incur an additional “board” payment, but they would split the “room” payment - it still winds up costing each person less when they share a room. Similar situations can be created for parents with children.
The design of the building features industrial kitchen and laundry, with showering facilities that include a sauna, and plenty of communal spaces: a workshop, recreation rooms/nooks; places suitable for everything from dances to gardens to play rooms for kids.
Okay, so we’ve got low income workers with a lower cost of living, higher quality of life, more free time, they’re building equity -- in 15 years they’ll own the building (joint ownership, the contract will have to be drawn up by a lawyer and include things like buy-outs, opt-outs, and what happens if somebody has to be kicked out of Group A). Owning the building opens up several options but there are three main possibilities. One: continue living there and your cost of living is roughly halved, you can even still charge the full amount to Group B and have nearly zero cost of living which is a great way to prepare for retirement. Two: sell the building, which has probably increased in value and split the money. Three: sell the building and use the profits to set up a large garden that includes maybe some chickens, a cow or two, a couple goats, and a fish farming pool.
But wait, there's more.
A facility like the one I’ve outlined is an incubator for entrepreneurial projects that can start in house and then be offered to the surrounding neighborhood when ready (this is part of why the zoning is important). Let’s look at four small businesses activities: Bicycle Repair, Clothing Line, Dessert Shop, and Babysitting.
When I lived in a warehouse in Oakland, most of us had bikes. Our resident bike enthusiast offered to keep our bikes in good repair if we all pitched in and bought him some parts and tools. Having the tools and the warehouse space, he was ready to also offer low cost repairs to anyone living nearby.
We’re already offering laundry service. It would be easy to begin to provide things like button repair, darning, hemming etc. Slow at first, it would eventually be worth dipping into community funds for a sewing machine and some supplies. As equipment and skill both increased, the Laundry might start offering to add pockets to anything, and provide all kinds of alteration and tailoring. Keep growing and eventually you might see original clothing items being produced.
Third, if somebody wanted to start a dessert shop, it would be extremely low risk in three distinct areas. 1: the industrial kitchen is already paid for, no need to rent a separate kitchen or shop. 2: There is a captive market of 60 people who are probably going to be customers; I can tell you from experience that if you are living in a warehouse and selling cookies, at some point nearly all the residents are going to buy one. 3: if you buy a bunch of ingredients, or make pies and cakes that don’t sell, the facility can absorb much of that back into the meal plan, easing the cost risk for the entrepreneur and eliminating most of the possible waste. If residents did not want the public in their building, a simple service window on one outside wall would do.
Lastly, a person who was providing babysitting for the community could petition the community to help them pay for CPR certification and other qualifications parents like people in charge of their kids to have, at which point they could offer a low income daycare to the neighborhood. The cost is kept low because their is no additional rent on a building to do it in, keeping it affordable for low income folks in the area immediately around the facility, while providing funding to improve things for the children of that facility, such as play equipment, art supplies, etc.
If at any point any of these endeavors become too big to comfortably be contained in the facility, they are probably successful enough to obtain a proper lease somewhere else and grow into a full fledged business.
Now, while the design of this style of facility and community is meant to allow an open-ended advantage in developing these kinds of scenarios, I have a specific trajectory for the first one, centering around the caretakers. See, the above is just the first part, the larval stage of the socio-economic worm I’m trying to hack into our society. It is important to note that ideally this process will continue itself, with group B paying off the building and starting another one, and so on. Additionally just the benefits of a community that provides a lower cost of living for a higher quality of life should be copied by people who see it working. I would hope to see many other groups starting up their own versions of what I've outlined above. As more and more facilities come on, I would hope to see them network. Further leveraging of group dynamics at this level would allow greater political influence, market influence, etc.
Now let's continue to examine the specific trajectory I've set for Group A.
Once the management of the facility is going strong, the goal would be to offer the same single payment full service lifestyle to middle class households. Currently, because of the aforementioned time crunch, many middle class folks are attempting to buy their way out of the impossibility. In other words, running a household and raising two kids is four full time people’s worth of labor, so they pay someone to garden, to do housekeeping, they eat out a lot, they pay for day care, they use a dry cleaning service for their laundry... And it’s often a struggle for them, trying to find the balance between having no time and no money.
So we offer them all those things as one service. We put them on the meal plan, our caretakers visit their house and clean it, their laundry gets done in our laundry facility. Leveraging group dynamics allows us to keep costs lower for them (for instance when you have a gardener and a laundry service and a housekeeper you have to pay them each enough to include their costs for vehicle maintenance and gas, etc, but a single service would get all three people there in the same vehicle, lowering costs). At the same time, these jobs all often pay twice minimum wage or even more. So as more households became clients, more people in the facility would quit their minimum wage jobs and join the caretakers. Eventually most people living in the facility would be working for this business, earning close to twice as much as they used to, and the original 10 caretaker positions would become team management positions.
The next stage of the plan involves a second facility and the creation of Community Support Centers.
The second facility is where Group A moves once they pay off the first facility. It is a nicer building designed along the same basic concepts of group living. No caretakers in this building, as it is serviced by the caretaker business from the first building. Additionally, group C (the group joining group A in the 2nd building) is not minimum wage workers, but is instead from the next economic tier, being comprised of nurses or paramedics, paralegals, teachers or teacher assistants, bankers (not the higher ups, but the people who work in the bank with the tellers) construction workers, etc. They pay a little more, the facility is a little nicer, the care-taking is more complete. However there is an interesting additional community dynamic that improves things for both facilities as well as the surrounding neighborhood.
The same things that allow the first facility to lower cost of living is keeping the cost of living low for the people in the second facility. Accordingly, part of their “rent” is community service - a certain amount of labor in their field (maybe twenty hours a month) that is offered to the people in the two facilities. Importantly, any unclaimed time is offered to the surrounding neighborhood. So a banker who has spent 10 hours one month giving financial advice and offering budgeting and investment advice to residents of the two facilities would have ten hours left to offer people in the neighborhood who had questions about how home loans work etc.
This relationship is designed to grow into Community Support Centers offering financial advice, legal advice, pre-emergency room visits, after school programs, etc. Meanwhile other professions, like construction worker, can fold directly into the services being offered to middle class homes by the first facility. As paralegals become lawyers and daycare workers become teachers, these Community Support Centers are poised to spawn whole institutions, including:
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, etc. The point is all students learn about plants and food producion and then either pursue other courses or continue to specialize. The same system would be true of all other areas -- all students would learn how to use a hammer, upper classes would be making furniture. And the work that they were doing would be USED in the school, which would therefor function as a practice society to learn on.
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. Farmers Market stalls are paid for in produce, providing a consumer for all unsold produce before it goes bad. There is an onsite industrial kitchen and restaurant that uses overstock from the farmer’s market and ingredients from the garden. 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.
Instead of a tool seciotn that sells tools, Alt-Mart features a tool-library with a high-density 3D 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 (we used to do this in the warehouse I lived in and the toys were awesome)
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. This comes into play during the next stage of development for Moulin Noir.
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. The way banks work, you give them your money, they add it to everyone else's money, and they invest it; they use the money from that investment to pay employees and rent on their facilities and stuff. So the only reason a bank should charge fees or anything is greed. Therefor: non-profit / public owned credit union.
HOSPITAL/CLINIC
The first medical services offered by Community Support Centers would just be a medical professional that can answer common questions, provide some emergency medical response / 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. There's a possibility that Community Support Centers could grow in to small practices with one to three doctors, a couple nurses, a paramedic and an ambulance. Anything the small practice couldn't handle could be deffered to large hospitals and specialists via the ambulance if neccessary.
CATERING AND EVENTS COMPANY
This is what get’s the ball rolling, throwing fundraising and membership/networking events. 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 and eventually includes news. There's a traveling circus element. It's fun. More on that later.
Okay, we're ready for stage four. This is where we can go out and provide infrastructure and support to deeply rural areas as well.
Eventually, you can take all these businesses and institutions, your bank and general store and school and everything, and you use your large construction company to go build a whole city, which looks a little like this:
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 closed loop sustainability, design it from the ground up. For example:
Grey water. In this city, only approved cleansers are allowed for sale or use. So, no bleach down the drain. Now you can take the grey water of the city, and pump it up to the top of the hill 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 the sun which also helps. 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. Many municipalities run seperate facilities for power generation and water purification, which is inefficient. Ideally the energy for steaming the water will come partially or entirely from solar and wind
The hill and lakes allow the surrounding area to produce almost all the food for the small city. With the hill creating micro environments for sun, shade, and wind differentials. So we're building this city in the heart of farmland, but we need farmers to live in the city too.
In terms of municiple economics, there is no landlordship in the city. All property within city limits is held in trust for the citizens of the city, administered by elected city officials, and residents lease directly from the city. This means the city budget has the entire "rent" payment from each residence instead of trying to run on the 2% property tax most municiple budgets are made of. It allows the city more control over costs of living and gives them revenue sufficient to provide health care, top tier schools, well managed public spaces, and programs that address things like homelessness.
When the city population doubles, half of them build a city next door and live there.
To recap here, even before we build a whole city the ideal scenario:
28 people from group A live in a nice 60 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, their cost of living is low compared to the rest of the economy. 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. They achieve all of this in 30 years, starting with nothing more than minimum wage 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...