Episode 91: Affordable Housing Models with Karl Fitzgerald and Morag Gamble

Our housing system is broken, but where do we look for different ways forward and a theory of change?

Come and join me with economist Karl Fitzgerald from Grounded the new Community Land Trust Advocacy (and formerly of Prosper Australia ). 

Karl advocates that a saner future awaits when we focus on a community land housing solution that moves us away from the speculative drive and sprawl. He is dedicated to creating and sharing new models and developing housing futures that are intertwined with the permaculture movement. 

Listen throughout for how Karl cleverly describes this model of community land trusts through the language of permaculture principles, and describes a community-led `affordable housing option. 

So many possibilities presented. Grounded is researching ways forward - to come together. Grow together!

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Karl mentioned:
Community land trust UK
Cornwall CLT
Champlain CLT Vermont 

Karl also mentioned the First Knowledges series of books .

Transcript

Morag:

Hello and welcome. I'm Morag Gamble and you're tuning in to the Sense-making in a Changing World Show. We've all heard about the housing crisis. What's going on? The system's broken. So where do we look for different ways forward and what theory of change? Come and join me in this conversation with economist Karl Fitzgerald, from Grounded; the new Community Land Trust Advocacy organization. Karl advocates that a future awaits when we focus on a community land housing solution that moves us away from the speculative drive and sprawl. He's dedicated to creating and sharing new models and developing housing futures that are intertwined with the permaculture movement. Listen throughout for how Karl cleverly describes his model of Community Land Trust with the language of permaculture principles and describes a community led affordable housing option. So many possibilities are presented and Grounded is continuing to research ways forward to come together and grow together. Also, if you're listening to this show, as it's going out live, check out the show notes because Grounded is hosting a conversation on the first of March. So this show is hosted by the Permaculture Education Institute and I'm calling in from the unseeded lands of the Gubbi Gubbi here at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in Southeast Queensland and make sure you subscribe so you get notifications of these regular podcast episodes and leave us a lovely review because it really does help the algorithms to find and share our little podcast. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

Welcome everyone to the show. It's Sense-making in a Changing World Show. I have a special guest here today, Karl Fitzgerald, who is the Founder and Director of the Community Land Trust Advocacy group called, Grounded, and we met a few years ago now on the banks of the Bureau rang the (2:05) Yarra in Melbourne. You're in a stall opposite David Hunger stall, with your hat of prosper on. So just as a little bit of background, Karl is an economist and he talks a lot about what's going on in our world of housing. Now, it's fair to say that we're in the midst of a housing crisis right now. But this is something that you've been working on for a very long time. I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of a background of why and what is it that's going on in the housing system that has led you to focus so intensely on it and how does Grounded then start to address what you see?

Karl:

Thanks, Morag. I’m speaking to you here from JoJo Warren, lands in central Victoria. Where this housing market is running, again, ahead of the reality of our wages and for about 20 years now I've been studying this pressure point that people seem to think is just too hard to fix and there's only a handful of us economists who are seriously looking at the most effective and fastest way to turn this around. That's what I did at Prosper Australia for about 18 years, specializing in firstly, vacant land and housing and how during a housing supply crisis vacancy was conveniently ignored. So it was kind of bizarre that there must have been 1000s of press releases about housing supply and the need to sprawl further and further around Melbourne around every capital city, because supply just doesn't matter. It’s not keeping up with the population growth and for years we used water consumption as a proxy for vacancy, and recognized that the declared vacancy rate was about 1/3 of what we would find when we added up all of the vacant houses, and importantly, the vacant blocks of land. But those land sites had to have water meters turned on for them to come up or using zero liters of water over 12 months, or less than 50 liters of water was our high end marker. But when most households use 176 Liters per person per day, we thought that was an indicator that 50 liters of the leaking taps and pipes that occur we're in an aging city. So what we figured out though was that it didn't include what's happening in those “so called” master planned communities that are on the edge of every city, big powerful developers get the rezoning and continue this sort of cookie cutter housing type that so many permaculture people pull their hair out over on on so many levels.

But during this time, around 2010, we're getting very excited about the potential of using property data and geospatial analysis to observe and interact with the way the economic functions were playing out in our own communities. But unfortunately, in what seemed like a bit of an edek (06:02) data of Davos, many of the land data offices around the world were privatized and the cost of accessing that data went through the roof. So I spent about seven or eight years telling this story of this dream report I wanted to do, and finally, convinced Cameron to marry a Queensland economist, many of you will know, who does fantastic work. We teamed up and wrote the staged releases report. He did the academic version and I sort of did the public, remotely readable version and we found that developers actually manufacture scarcity through the way they deliver all of these housing opportunities to the market so that early to mid 2017, clearance rates were starting to drop and so the algorithms came through for all of the the six major developers in nine master plan communities with 110,000 lots and they pulled 47% of the supply from the market. So that prices had a floor placed under them and 2017 became, at the time, Australia's most profitable year for the increase in land prices.

Morag:

Can I just interrupt here because I'd like to go back a bit when you're talking about vacancies there. You said that it was 1/3 of what was declared, what was being declared? What are those kinds of vacancies statistics in the first place? What are you noticing?

Karl:

Sorry if I said it wrong, but it was three times what was declared. So three times higher, basically what we read about in the papers and when we first started this, luckily, one of our researchers, Phillip Seuss, actually went into the Real Estate Institute of Victoria and banged on the door and said, “I'm not leaving here until someone gives me an answer. Where does this theory that you keep spouting on the front page of the press say that an effective vacancy rate is 3%?” There's never been an academic paper on it, nothing and they admitted to him that it was made up. And we looked further and of course, the REIV vacancy rate was a voluntary survey of real estate agents and so if vacancies were high, there was no motivation to fill out that survey. But if they were low, they would fill that out and the numbers would come through that renters have to get on their knees and beg for somewhere to live. So this whole philosophy around housing supply being the trickle down economics, savior of these pricing pressures we all face each week, has so many holes in it and I've tried so many ways to get people to understand it. It's good to be with you here on the Sense-making podcast, trying to make sense of how our economic system that is so revered has got so badly misdirected when it comes to, not just housing, but all of our land and natural resources.

Morag:

So just to pick up on the last point that you made before around the scarcity fast that exists. Could you just explain a little bit about where the regulations come into this or not and how much government policy has over where housing goes, how it's developed? Where is the edge between the government's policies of offering housing for people and the developers? What's going on there?

Karl:

Obviously, a tight correlation between donations to political parties and rezonings and camera mary has done a lot of great work on that showing that those who don't just make donations, but who employ related parties, to politicians in their extended families have a tighter, 37% greater chance of getting their land rezoned, which with every Golden pentik (11:09) of rezoning is worth millions and millions of dollars. So the shocking thing is that the Australian Stock Exchange is worth about $2 trillion, but the Australian land market is worth $8 trillion, so a triple C doesn't investigate this at all. So they do not look at the behavior of developers and it's sort of all care, no responsibility. They give the rezoning tick and then they don't look at how the developers roll out that supply in terms of the pricing effects, so they believe they're good samaritans and nobody is concerned about what's going on. That was kind of my final report for prosper was in my dream report and I'm still sneaking in emails, trying to find ways into a triple C. I've got to get in touch with Andrew Lee, the Assistant Treasurer, I think is the minister for competition and charities he is. So here's a switched on economist in the government. Hopefully, he can help to bring a lens on this behavior. Because if it was any other industry, you'd think developers would be under a lot more oversight. And yeah, I'm sort of at the stage where I'm trying to get code written to give to the Australian, the global housing, affordability movement to start monitoring the masterplan communities that are happening in their community, because that's what we need, we need to take control of this and start making sure that these politicians who often own lots of property investments are aware that we're watching them and we know that these decisions, particularly these $500 million train stations that are being built, they stop the supply until that train station is opened up. Then of course, the value goes through the roof. But who funds that train station, people who live hundreds of kilometers away from it, not the developers who see often a 50-70% increase in the value of the land surrounding that train station.

Morag:

That's really quite evident that the system is broken and the system needs changing, which is what you're advocating through Grounded? So if this is how it currently is, it's completely unjust and twisted. What are you proposing are our ways forward and what examples have you seen, perhaps, around the world that can point to other models of housing people fairly, justly and ecologically that can see our way forward?

Karl:

Talking on the macro economy front, I have spent 18 years trying to make tax reform sexy and in terms of a theory of change, it's probably not the best one. I tried all sorts of different ways to get people on board. But with Grounded, I'm trying to establish a number of what's known as, Community Land Trust, as a demonstration models of what would happen if the land bubble, the property bubble, was shared amongst our community and acted to make our community stronger, rather than enforcing change with rent racking increase after rent increase. So the Community Land Trust model has 50 years of history in America now and post the global financial crisis in the UK there have boomed from a dozen to upwards of 500 CLTs on the go and that sort of escalation has only been possible because both sides of politics have come together to recognize that we need a community led housing model, we need one that's for purpose rather than for profit and it's sort of a tic tac towards a common sense economy where this speculative drive to make money off the earth, whether it's iron ore or the electromagnetic spectrum, it's the same principles that we see in real estate and that's where a sign of future awaits us, is deterring that sort of speculative behavior and encouraging productive activity and unfortunately, that treadmill just keeps accelerating at the moment, because the land price dictates that rents must go up. From that, more and more of us are having domestics around the dinner table, rather than these loving conversations, because people won't engage with this boring, boring topic called Tax.

Morag:

Having lived for 25 years in a place that is basically a commons, where I live is Crystal Waters, and it's not a Community Land Trust, but we own the land together as a whole and 86% of that land we look after as a group of people. So there's 250 People who live here. I've got the one acre amongst these 600 odd acres, that is what I kind of steward and the rest is common lands, no fences. There's something quite extraordinary about living here. I grew up in the suburbs, but the suburbs that I grew up in were kind of the sort of suburbs where they weren't the fences, where people were ranging around and I know that that's changed. So I kind of live in a little bit of an isolated bubble, I think, because every time I talk about trying to help communities to get something similar, up and running, there's so many barriers that get in the way of this kind of model going ahead and similarly traveling around the world, visiting many of the extraordinary communities like Horseshoe and in Denmark, where there's houses that are pushed into sort of a more little clusters and making space for a farm in the middle. So when you actually have the possibility for designing and you design it completely differently than just carving up the land into little pastures and leaving no space for community or food or any other activity that you might collectively imagine is possible. So can you tell us a little bit how Community Land Trust's might help to shift from us being so stuck here in Australia for the possibilities for more of this to happen when we know it's so nourishing for people on the planet?

Karl:

Yes, well, that's what Grounded has really been set up to do because many of you will know the amazing efforts that Louise Crabtree-Hayes has done out of the University of Western Sydney, she has produced a couple of Community Land Trust manuals that help people understand how to make your way forward. There's a lot of evidence from around the world. But we've had problems with the Planning Act, we've had problems with finance in particular. Local governments don't know what it is, state governments don't know either, the feds they've heard a bit about it, all three levels of government, but there hasn't been that extra support mechanism to help get some of these projects over the line so that we can start to see the evidence of what happens when a location and that rising value is kept within the community, rather than funding someone Ski holiday in Aspen. So that's what we're set up to do and I'm looking forward to firing off my federal budget submission today, highlighting some of these things that could be done and an easy one, many of you will know about Environmental Land Trust, set up to preserve forests and wildlife corridors, those exact tax incentives could quite easily be copied into any into the Community Land Trust space, so that any ethical land holder who wants to donate land to a local community trying to set up an affordable farming pod. Because access to farmland is just so expensive for young farmers now and here, we've got to do something to get the next generation of farmers in. So it can happen in a farm scenario within a town, but we need to start sending those tax incentives towards those that are doing good for society. So back to my old tax story again, it's so important to really apply self regulation and accept feedback and we know that the carrot that drives that self regulation is the tax system in a market based world. 

Morag:

Can you explain that a bit more for non economists type people, what tax changes need to happen and how could that happen?

Karl:

Okay, I just want to bridge to that by discussing. Many people in the environmental economics movement talk about the need for a gross national happiness indicator, a fairer measure of GDP, all of these things, but that all happens after the decisions have been made. So you're sort of playing catch up. Whereas if you reform the tax system, that's the carrot that encourages behavior in certain areas and up until about 200 years ago, landlords used to pay for the governing of the land, they would fund the roads, they would fund the armies and that's how they would protect the land. But, yes, since the enclosures have been common some 500 years, that's been dwindling and now we're in a situation where corporates can avoid taxes with their armies of accountants and wage earners are left in their fluro jackets with a target on the back of them saying, “Pay the taxes! Pay the taxes!” And lo and behold, Rupert Murdoch comes along and distracts them with any sort of easy to grasp concept and we don't have that depth of analysis that helps people recognize that we've got 176 tax points and 125 taxes, but only 10 of them raise 90% of that the total taxes. So when you get your head around this story and I'm speaking from a perspective of what's known as Georgism, where Henry George was a famous economist who came to Australia in 1890 and helped the union movement understand economics helped governments recognize that aristocratic families from England shouldn't be buying up land, in the hope of acing where the nation's capital was going to be built between Canberra and Melbourne. And so very cleverly, the ACT was designed under a leasehold system, where it's more close to this concept of being custodians of the Earth, rather than consumers and so when you're paying a leasehold to the government, you actually have to earn some money from that and that ensures that vacant land. Vacant housing is put to better use rather than squandered if you like and speculated upon for easy profits. So their big tax switch, we're seeing a little bit of it in New South Wales, but after sitting through maybe half a dozen meetings with the head of the treasury department in charge of that, of course, the political process bastardize this switch away from stamp duty and towards my beloved land tax. 

So you get passionate about land taxes, I never ever thought I would be that sort of person. But when you consider that tax is, in a way, the white man's word for sharing and if we share the bounty of the land and it's done on an annual basis with accurate valuations, we, I'm one of the few economists in the world to actually work out what we could do to replace old taxes on productive enterprise and replace them on monopoly. Then textbooks tell us we've got only 3% of what's known as economic rent, this earth bounty. But when you count it up, about a quarter of the Australian economy, up to a third is this natural bounty that we created that community and when you look at all the tax theory, this whole concept wins, in terms of efficiency, and fairness. So every now and again, you'll bump into someone like Martin Wolf in the Financial Times this week, reminding economists and the everyday person that this is the fairest and the best system that we need to stop the sprawl and move towards this true cost economics framework that we need. So I'm bringing that sort of background into the Community Land Trust world and having seen some of my forebears in America, having set up intentional communities in the early 1900s and seen places like Arden, Delaware, there's a land trust there were very quickly, in about 10 years, they paid off all their debts. I had beautiful houses and became a nudist colony, great for them, but that's an enclave. What's it doing to spread its wings and share this message so that other other communities can enjoy these sorts of benefits that you guys are at crystal waters, tangible falls, Nimbin, Maura here in Victoria, these are all communities that have been somewhere around 30 to 50 years in the making and how do we get an expansion from the space? So I'm sort of looking at not only improving the Community Land Trust economic model, but also improving the governance side of it and being Grounded. We like to think that there's a need to focus on the social synergies of communities and how we can improve those two. So there's a lot of history we can learn from.

Morag:

Say in an urban area, for example, and you're trying to create a Community Land Trust in an urban area, land prices are so ridiculously high and there's a possibility of another kind of type of development happening. What are the possibilities that you see for urban communities to establish Community Land Trust, as opposed to going out to the countryside somewhere and setting something up? Where do you see that?

Karl:

That is the hard one, isn't it? Land prices are just so high, we need multi storey apartment dwellings if you like to try and make some sort of economic sense of the price paid and my first piece of advice is to understand the property cycle and make sure you're patient and ready to buy when those downturns occur about every seven years or so; that's the first point of call. But when it comes to other tactics, it's of course, looking for ethical property owners. There are a lot of people out there who recognize how bad this system is who want to incorporate permaculture principles into their life and I'd love to see this Community Land Trust model intertwined with the permaculture movement because it just makes so much sense that we’re not only catching and store energy, but this yield that we all bring and just imagine where the listeners are today that if everyone left their town and no one lived there, what would that land be worth? I'd be worth next to nothing. But soon as we all come back, the competition for location sends prices skyward and helps you recognize that that is actually community created and that was the basis for the public finance sector. Community Land Trust is just a small version of that, but that is a big one. I'm working my model into shape, Morag. But the Urban Land Trust model is something that we need, churches are often another one that have surplus land and so getting local councils to do an audit of their land holdings, often, they don't actually know how much land they've got, they don't know what's in use and what's not. Get them to expand that search into other government ownership vehicles and understand what's happening within those land holdings as well. Because often there are hidden sites there and I'm hoping that in some of the research grounds it's going to be released will show how these sites that are often overrun with weeds, blackberries and whatnot can quickly become something that is a valued community resource.

Morag:

So just on that, then, can you explain to listeners who might not be familiar with the Community Land Trust model, how it actually helps to keep rents lower and how it serves the community that's part of it. And maybe a part of that conversation there, how does it evolve over time? So you've got your pioneers who really get it and are pushing it and what happens? What have you noticed that happens after when the next gen comes through and how do you maintain that push?

Karl:

Well, that's the big thing with the Land Trust is that it at least recognizes that over time, the land and living in that community becomes more valuable. So a well governed Community Land Trust will put a formula in place to ensure that land on and houses can be bought at a ratio either of 30% of the bottom 40% income earnings, the so called 30/40 rule. So that means that rent payments would be a rent and housing payments would be capped at 30% of the median income for the bottom 40% of income earners. So that's one formula. Another one is too limited, say 60, or 70%, of the median value of housing in the area. So that's another way that he keeps a cap on it. I've kind of preferred the first one because 70% of a million dollars is still a heck ton of money. So how the model that Grounded is working on is hopefully gonna make things even better than that. So, the basic concept is that the land is owned in perpetuity by the Community Land Trust and in its purest form, someone buying into it would only own the house. So that immediately when you consider a mortgage, some 70% is the land component, only 30% Is the house. That means your deposit requirements plummet by 70%. So in its purest form that can occur and is a massive spur of hope for those locked out of housing, who just wonder if this is ever possible, am I going to be in a precarious situation for the rest of my life and all the mental health and wider health aspects that that leads to with national health budgets, going through the roof, in terms of cost. It's something that in the UK now they're finding that when you look at the sort of health and well being aspects and the income distribution angles over 30 years, the return on investment is 3.1 to $1 invested and that is absolutely massive compared to the Albanese government's policy of Help to Buy, which is spending $80 million a year to basically make prices more expensive and to only last for one one generation of ownership. So when they sell that subsidies last and with a CLT. Instead, any subsidy is retained within the community and reinvested to expand the base for housing.

Morag:

So with what you've just said, apart from the donations from developers, why hasn't the government not jumped on this as being a solution to so many of society's problems? I still just can't quite grasp why people would not be doing this more, it just makes so much sense.

Karl:

Yes, it does. Well, we are a property owning democracy and when you look into the depths of our Westminster system, it's only 70 years here in Victoria, that you had to own property to be a member of the upper house. So that hangover is still rippling through society and those powerful families, those powerful companies, they know how the system works, and they must have some incredible planning strategy weekend's where they figure out that, “Oh, gee! We better lock up the data before everyone catches on to what we're up to.” So that's one thing the banking industry, obviously, also recognizes it would cut into their profits. So somewhere in that sort of space. Also,I feel like that the CLT model can do with some improvements as well. I'm looking forward to seeing a constant evolution in the way we treat Land and Housing and design and what will be the improvements in the next 20 or 30 years. For too long, we've been stuck in a rut and we're grounded on a mission to try and find those who are thinking about this problem and pushing the edge and their particular expertise to come together and try and rebuild the housing model. So that it's not only fairer, but way more self sufficient than it is now.

Morag:

I mean, there's a lot of young families that I come across, through the work that I do, and single older women as well, who are just desperately looking for places now, not in like 20 to 30 years' time. Is this model ready enough for people to grab hold of it and to try and start something somewhere?

Karl:

Well, go to the Grounded website and you'll find on there, Louise, the wheezes incredible Community Land Trust manuals, and look at the first one. And my tip is to skip straight to the appendix. Unfortunately, it only covers New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. But for anyone in those states, there's a good handle on how to move forward. More banks are coming on board and I'm hoping we're going to have some hot contacts there on the right person to speak to in the next few months. It's about really finding that ethical landholder in your community and trying to work with them to bring this model up to up to spec. I'd like to think that this time in a year will be really humming. But we're just barely six months into getting our heads around all the various planning laws in each state and what potentials are possible and Queensland for a long time hasn't really been that open to multiple occupancy and that sort of community living, but it seems like there's movements coming through so we're busy trying to push that barrel along.

Morag:

Do you have a series or a set of examples that you point to in other parts of the world that people can look into and go, “Okay, well, that's what's happening in the States.” The more I understand it, the more I can get my head around and see the shape of what that looks like. And maybe in the UK or Europe, what have you seen that highlight projects that you would hold up as demonstrations of this in practice?

Karl:

Yes. Well, I'd strongly encourage everyone to subscribe to the news of the communitylandtrust.org.uk, I think it is the big CLT network there. They're doing incredible work and the Cornwall CLT, down there is booming. I’d love to get to know the people down in Cornwall because whatever they're doing, they're really pushing things along. So they're probably the most watched people in America. It's always been the Champlain Community Land Trust, which was set up in 1980, with $200,000 of seed funding from the mayor of Vermont, who was Bernie Sanders at the house. So there are deep roots in the American economic history surrounding Community Land Trust's and Grounded Solutions is one of the leading groups there that is doing good work and you'll find some links on our resources, pages to those groups. But there's so much potential when we all come together if we get the economic foundations, if we get the entry and exit plans, right, people being able to sell when they want to, having signed a legal document, and having got their lawyer to also sign it, that they understand joining a CLT is not something that is going to deliver you bucket loads of money, but it's going to give you a stable roof over your head and you're gonna have an active community who want to participate and live together to make life easier, then that's what a CLT can offer.

Morag:

It's a really different model, isn't it? Because of such a push on investment, housing, that's where people put their money to get the money. So that whole mind frame has to shift. I want to ask you about the entry point. So do you find that banks are open to people getting money to build a house on a CLT? Can they get a loan in that way? How's that working?

Karl:

Well, Australia's first CLT is on life support up in Stradbroke Island that Gary Fleming half and Andrew have up there. If you check out CLT associates, you'll find a link to it. But they had to take a loan, a personal loan out ,to build the home, they couldn't actually get a mortgage. But apparently, a guy named Jason Twill and Louise Crabtree-Hayes found more support than they expected through the banking community. So if anyone's got a board member at the Bank of Adelaide, I'd love to hear from you. They seem to be one of the more progressive banks in the country and most likely to support a CLT.

Morag:

Australia (43:43), have you explored anything with them at all?

Karl:

Not enough, no. Same thing. They're one of those top banks too. I think they're related to the bank of Adelaide bank, Australia.

Morag:

Sounds like they seem to me to be one of those ones that would be more likely to do that. I think that's one of the reasons why Crystal Waters has the model that we share most of the land, but the bit that we have our house on, we have our freehold title to be able to get that mortgage. That was kind of the reason why to facilitate that entry in that exit that structure was implemented to facilitate that, because before then, people couldn't get mortgages. They had to build shacks, illegal shacks over the property 30 odd years ago, and then there wasn't enough agreement on how things were working. It was pretty, pretty wild and wooly, back then. But that entry and exit point I think is really, really important and it would seem to me like to be one of those key things that helps people feel a bit more comfortable if they understand how that's possible and how that can work. What about if you have no money? If you have no backing? Like how do you enter into CLT in that way?

Karl:

Well, what we're seeing in the UK in particular is a recognition of this and it's often 50/50 between ownership and rental and they've found there's actually such a dearth of affordable rentals that they're orientating more in that direction. Now, they've got good links into ethical finance. But, often during my time at prosper, every time I'd speak about CLTs or be surrounded by people wanting to know more and I could never dedicate enough time to it. But along that journey, I met a number of people who were sort of anti property speculation and thought the key to it all was to set up a total rental community. Sounds great, but it means you need billions more, basically, to make it happen and the risk profile that is attached to that is massive and it's very, very hard to get financed under that sort of model. So hopefully, we will have a number of different mixes available for communities looking to establish a land trust and from that, we'll be able to streamline the number of meetings that are needed. I'm horrified to hear how many groups have met for 8 to 10, to even 14 years they've met to try and establish their intentional community with no money, no land, and still they're forged ahead. How can we provide the resources so that within a couple of years, you can start turning that site and getting this much needed alternative to housing on the ground and inaction.

Morag:

I think it's gonna unlock a huge potential of people being able to live a much more regenerative life and also find that well-being is one of the things you're focusing on in a session that's coming up soon and Grounded is around governance. Do you want to tell us a bit about that focus that you've got?

Karl:

I'm keen to learn from the wisdom of the Australian Intentional Community Movement. So we've got a ‘Make Your Own rules' event’ explorations in good governance on March the first and we have Crystal Waters and Robin Clayfield. Presenting alongside Megan James from tangible falls and Peter Kok from Mora Mora. We're gonna really delve into how to do the whole startup process in setting up your community and how to best organize it. So this governance is established for the entry exit and importantly for the core objects of your constitution and making sure that you've got a long term plan in place because within 10 years, you're going to pay down your debts and then how are you going to keep your community together and driving towards a deeper objective that helps society. So I'm looking forward to hearing a synopsis of all of those trials and tribulations of setting up and running a community over 50 years, tangible falls, crystal waters, it's amazing how long people are sitting around a table and preserving the sanctity of having a community led housing opportunity  for people to experience.

Morag:

There's so much wealth of knowledge in so many groups and I really take my hat off to you with trying to find the possibilities for this to myceliate. There's so much possibility.

Karl:

And philanthropists are loving it. So they're keen to be involved and they just want to find a scalable model that's going to work and that's what I'm working hammer and tong on is to really pull the best of the current housing model with the CLT model so that we can, basically, get that initial capital investment repaid off reasonably quickly and gain sovereignty over this land as quickly as we can in a world of unseeded land.

Morag:

I really liked the way that you described Grounded your values, articulated them really beautifully on your site and I was doing a bit of reading before, but the first value was that of recognizing that we are an unseeded country and maybe you could just wrap up a little bit around your relationship in that context.

Karl:

It’s such a massive issue and the way we treat it. But the theft of land, we have to deal with that and we're really hoping we can help. There's a couple of indigenous led housing NGOs coming along, so we're hoping we can work with them. But we're grounded in recognition of First Nations people and how well they managed this land for so long and I just gotta give a plug, this book, this first knowledge series coming out of Melbourne University. There's an incredible book called Design, there's another one called Country on Cultural Burns. It's just amazing the knowledge that's out there and we do live amongst the oldest and wisest people on the planet, but we're grounded in place. We recognize that land must be managed and cared for, according to its specific place base needs in our ecology, of course, in justice, everyone deserves a home, and the ability to nurture and protect that land as well. We’re grounded in equity, that land values must be based on the reality of our incomes and not some sort of speculative, pricing trajectory that we're on and we're grounded in responsibility in that we need to build a greener, fairer world for the future and then last, but not least, we have to be grounded in community and helping people come together and grow together and as fellas, we need to grow perhaps a little bit more. But how can we make emotional intelligence and those sorts of principles of sharing our deepest issues with our inner circles so that we can actually be more rounded and grounded.

Morag:

I really want to encourage everyone who's listening to explore this more, whether you are a landowner and have the possibility of opening up an exploration of this with the community or whether you are a group of friends and are looking for ways forward, to dive into the CLT world. Is this event that you're organizing and subsequent events that I imagine you're organizing face to face? Are they something that people can catch up with if they're in other parts of the country? How's that all going to work and how can people follow your work at Grounded?

Karl:

Yeah, it's good old zoom so can anyone tune in. Check out our socials. 

Morag:

I'll put the links down below. So in the show notes, everyone can kind of find them. So find the one socials, that's where they'll get the links to events and any other resources. So yeah, that's great.

Karl:

The website is grounded.org.au. You can find all the links from there and the event promo will be up very soon.

Morag:

Great. Well, by the time people are listening to this, the event promo will be out and the event promo will be in the show notes. So have a look there and I hope you can join in and follow along and participate. More so in the Community Land Trust movement in Australia and we've permaculture beautifully in that it's something I've been talking about for a very long time since I first started creating the farms, community gardens projects, really finding it challenging. Like, where do urban farms exist? Where suburban development is sprawling out across all the best agricultural land? How can we take those models of the bush land trusts and take that concept and as a community pay for protecting the best agricultural land in and around our cities and setting up community farming trusts where we can be doing sustainable regenerative farming that feeds the city? It’s something I've been talking about for a long time and exploring different ways of weaving those together with our housing models, like the ones I mentioned in Denmark, they are beautiful places to live with thriving communities, safe places to raise your children, and great sense of well being and that your foods coming from the lands around you and the wastewater is going back in and soaking into the permaculture principles of design, really embrace this kind of way forward and I would love to see the possibilities of these restrictive legal and policy challenges being somehow unstuck to enable the imagination and the possibilities and the dedication that people have for 14 years, trying to make something happen to actually be able to do this is what the kind of climate scene future looks like.

Karl:

Yeah, all those people up in North Lismore regions and whatnot, dealing with this climate ravage future, how can we have a housing based system that encourages some sort of flexibility rather than locking us into a place that has a jumbo size mortgage and you've lost your life savings. So that's a lot easier under a CLT model, where you're only borrowing for the house. So it's a much smaller mortgage, much easier to pay it down, rather than this scenario we've got where it must just be we need a light at the end of the tunnel, and hopefully CLTs can help play a small part in providing that.

Morag:

Thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Karl. It's been a real pleasure to hear where you're heading with this. I know we've been talking about trying to have a conversation for a long time about this, because it is absolutely critical that we shift what's going on in this world of housing and what's driving it. You talk about shaking it up and disrupting this broken system. Well, that's what we need to do and I'm all in that with you.

Karl:

Thanks, Morag. Fantastic discussion and I’d love to check in sometime in the future with some stories of some of the sort of projects we're working on in the background at the moment trying to get up so people are moving in this space and hopefully we can get government finance and philanthropy moving in the same direction.

Morag:

Great. Thank you again and I'll see you on the first of March. 

Karl:

Excellent. Goodbye. 

Morag:

Take care. Thanks a lot. 

Thanks, everyone, for tuning into this Sense-making in a Changing World episode. I'm so delighted to be able to share my conversation with Karl Fitzgerald from Grounded with you about this essential topic of housing. Check out the links below because I've included all of the different references that Karl mentioned, as well as links to Grounded and our work here at the Permaculture Education Institute and remember to subscribe and leave us a lovely review. I'll see you next time.