A proto-arcology

I think they had the $$$ to take care of the one, but not the other.

Besides, with their small population, it may not have made sense to do both buildings.

Even if its expensive, I can't see a long term plan for the town that does not manage the eventual decay of that one building. Either, the town would be simply abandoned, or would build a new building, or, would move into a renovation of the other building.

Maybe they have a plan, but I'm a bit pessimistic. Hence "sad" goes along with "basically squatting", since without a plan for the future that's what they are doing.

Thx!

TomB

tomBitonti said:

Even if its expensive, I can't see a long term plan for the town that does not manage the eventual decay of that one building. Either, the town would be simply abandoned, or would build a new building, or, would move into a renovation of the other building.

Maybe they have a plan, but I'm a bit pessimistic. Hence "sad" goes along with "basically squatting", since without a plan for the future that's what they are doing.

Thx!

TomB

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Where is this coming from? They're not squatting, the building was deeded to them by the military. It's theirs.

As for the upkeep, I imagine that is where at least part of their taxes go.

Yes, but, I imagine they paid quite a bit less for the building than the army did.

The town is literally self contained: Taxes are an internal mechanism to distribute maintenance costs. I don't think that gets at the question I'm asking, which about long term planning.

For a single family dwelling (say, a house), a lot of folks don't really have a very long term plan, other than to generally keep up the maintenance and to eventually sell (or not) in retirement. Or, to move after a few years, in which case the long term question for the dwelling doesn't matter much to them.

But a whole town, I would think, should think a bit more forward than one this. A problem, say, of deteriorating supports, or any number of other problems, would be a huge problem. If a single house has termites, or is made unusable by a natural disaster, there is enough other capacity (other houses) for the problem to be very local. But this town, if it had a problem, would be a whole other matter.

Thx!

TomB

Well, I can't speak for them, but I would imagine they're essentially living with ordinances similar to high-rise condos or certain HOAs.

That means some tax funds go to upkeep & maintenance, residents are constrained as to what they can and cannot do within the "city limits"- even in their own domiciles- and so forth.

Hi,

Wasn't meaning to be overly critical in my response. My apologies if that's how I presented myself.

I found the degree of self containment to make the building a nice case to use to explore questions of sustainability. The complex is not truly self contained, since a lot of the people that live there go outside the building to work, and because the building must rely, to a degree, on resources brought from outside.

The self containment does blur social stratification, including the separation of government from the governed. Or at least, that's what I'm imagining. I could be very off on that, with the building being owned and managed by folks who live far away, and the government might be largely located elsewhere. In either case, we can explore what that means using the building as a simple case.

E.g., without a long term plan, the people of the building must eventually leave, since the build will eventually fail. Then, we can use that as a metaphor for how people are treating this planet as a whole, and, unlike the people in the building, we have no-where to go. Or, if there is no long term plan, what does that say in regards to whether people will be able to deal with environmental and other global issues. That is, what hope do we have if this small enclave can't see to making a plan for sustainability?

Of course, I could be very wrong about that too, and they have made clear plans for the future. I'm very curious now about how the community is addressing these issues.

Thx!

TomB

well, the Mayor of it moved out, and lives outside the building per the article.

So he got tired of the easy access by pajama clad constituents.

I can see some taxes coming from the commercial fishing mentioned, or their town gets income from natural resources. Then they in turn use it or upkeep of the one building.