Projects

Democratic Development is a multifaceted intention. There is no one "right" way to do it and there are many related projects that could fall under its umbrella. Below are outlined some approaches that appear promising. If you are interested in any of these projects, or already working on one of them, please let me know at brendan@brendanmiller.com.

Modern barn raising and the potential of the acequia community model

I would love to put the art, skill and satisfaction of home building back into the hands of the people who will live there. This goes beyond the design process to the actual construction. This could be in the Habitat for Humanity model, or in the cobb or straw bale building traditions (selected appropriately for regional climates), but at the neighborhood or community level. Now that I am living in the Southwest, I am particularly interested in using adobe building as a way to create community.

I have also been very impressed with the tradition of "acequias" here in New Mexico. Communities, which rely on these manmade waterways for their food and livelihood, are also sustained socially through community-wide workdays spent maintaining them. The acequia water is owned in common and is a common good. Acequias really are the life-blood of these communities. I would like to see this model of democratic development used much more broadly. Water serves as an ideal focal point in the southwest: what would be a good focal point in your region?

Transit oriented, infill development

Too much of our nation is sprawling and disconnected. It is time to construct downtowns where they don’t exist, making it possible for people to: walk to see their friends or to the corner store, avoid traffic jams, preserve open space and agricultural lands, give life to historic old buildings and revitalize the sense of community that can only come from a pedestrian-friendly lifestyle. People are often afraid of density because they associate it from a loss of quality of life, but the tables are turning quickly as the problems of sprawl multiply. And we have learned a great deal about how to build densely without undermining privacy or freedom. It may require that that people develop skills of positive conflict resolution, but this is something our country badly needs anyway, and people will soon realize this is a quality of life improvement too.

Destination communities

What if you could relocate to a beautiful place with great quality life and bring all of your friends and family with you? What if you could also rest assured that you could find interesting work and make ends meet? What would stop you?

I believe we have entered an era in which more and more people will choose to leave big cities and move to small towns around the country and the world because there is everything to gain and nothing to lose because they can bring what they love and leave behind the hassles and problems. This movement is being started by retirees, but they will soon be followed families and young people. I believe this is not only eventually inevitable, but desirable from the perspective of smart growth and broad democratic participation, if done well. I would like to help see that this is done well.

Many people want to live in a beautiful, less populated place, but they are concerned about losing contact with friends or family, or missing the amenities or job opportunities of a large city.

Overbuilding in certain metropolitan areas are stressing natural resources and undermining their self-sufficiency. This can undermine energy, food and water security. What happens after peak oil? Where are our “arks” in the face of growing international instability and resource wars?

Right now, what happens as people move to pursue a higher quality of life is that so people move to “better” areas (think southern California) until it is just marginally better for that person to move than to say where they are. And what happens in the process is that quality life steadily goes down for those already living there. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario.

At the same time there are beacons of hope and glimpses of alternatives. Companies are now exploring “farmshore” operations (also known as “farmsourcing”) outsourcing high tech jobs to cheaper farm communities. Other businesses are moving their entire operations to mid size cities in beautiful locations like Bozeman, MT in order attract and retain employees...and because their business is not geographically bound. Towns like Portland, OR are uses urban growth boundaries to reign in sprawl and protect farmland and the balance of human development in natural surroundings. “Conservation communities” are springing up where development is clustered as a way to preserve surrounding open space. Retirees who no longer need to be near a job are colonizing small towns all across the country, particularly in the south and southwest. Cohousing communities are demonstrating that people are interested in thinking beyond a custom home to a custom community, even if they have to manage the development themselves to get it built. And finally, with the internet, culture can easily be transplanted. There is no need to feel like one would be cut off from the news, music, or even worldview regardless of where one moves.

Covenant communities

There is a challenge we face in building vibrant and supportive communities. On the one hand, we seek the comfort and safety of a community that we know shares our values. On the other hand, we know that the creative potential and vitality of a community comes from engaging cultural diversity. Is there a way to reconcile these two, apparently divergent goals? I would suggest yes and the key is recognizing that people from widely disparate cultural backgrounds can share a core set common values. Values related to how we should treat each other and live in community cross lines of religion, class and race. This is especially true for progressives who recognize that tradition is merely a guide and that there are many ways to live out the same values if we are open to considering them. Fundamentalists will have a harder time finding their place in our new, more interconnected world.

I would like to create culturally diverse “covenant communities” that pledge their commitment to live our a set of shared values, and even hold each other accountable to this goal. Once we learn how to do this, we have a third option beyond the homogenous communities of the past and the undifferentiated modern mess that most of us live in.

Reinventing Homeowners Associations

Even for communities where the residents are already in place, thinking more intentionally and deeply about how to live with one another is beneficial. Right now, Homeowners Associations are pretty shallow, focusing negatively on where your pets CAN’T poop and what colors you CAN’T paint your house. What if we took these Associations more seriously? What if they truly embodied a positive vision of the residents? What if these associations served as building block of democracy? This would require training and facilitation but would be very possible – and desirable for many people. Let’s start the revolutions now!

Ecovillages / Arks

It is clear to most people that our current way of life is unsustainable and will need to adapt to changing realities, including climate change, pollution, scarcity of natural resources from metals to forests to farmland, oil and water. What will the future look like? We will need radical examples and experiments that push our creativity and imagination and give us new models. Places that integrate and provide for our food, shelter and employment. This is something else we urgently need to work on.

And we may need these example sooner than we think. The consequences of peak world oil production, water scarcity and other problems will start to occur in more and more places, more and more frequently. People will be caught off guard as prices skyrocket and everyday systems of transportation and livelihood breakdown, perhaps never to recover. How will we survive these “growing pains” as we transition to a new mode of living? Ecovillages (the new Arks) will point the way and provide some refuge in the short term.

Mainstreaming cohousing (and other forms of community living)

People like Robert Putnam have clearly demonstrated the decline of the civic fabric in the United States. The basic building blocks of our civic fabric are our neighborhoods. As part of the effort of rebuilding our democracy we will need to begin living together differently. This will require mainstreaming cohousing and other models of community living and making them available to homeowners across the country. This will involve a combination of new development and redevelopment of the existing housing in existing neighborhoods. Accomplishing this will require perfecting the systems of physical and social community building to the point where there can run from start to finish in the time it takes for production homebuilding (about 18 months). Jim Leach at the Wonderland Hill has gotten it down to 3 years and that’s the current best record out there.

Planning for sustainability

I would like to see some towns and regions plan from a perspective of sustainability. From this viewpoint, one of the most important questions to ask is, “How many people can this region sustainably support?” I don’t know of the currently legality of populations controls, but I think we need them. Our current approach is to let people do whatever they want, which means that people move to a place until it is only marginally better than the place they left. In the process, this migration leads to destruction of the landscape and quality of life for the people already living there (via traffic, overcrowding, etc.). We need to intentionally preserve the commons and this requires establishing populations controls (based on hard science and demonstrable resource limitations).

I also think of sustainability beyond mere material needs to also encompass beauty and way of life. What if we organized a group of people to preserve an entire valley? Or watershed? This way, the landscape and the associated land uses (e.g. farming or ranching) could continue on, helping to ensure our food security and curbing sprawl.

Beyond sustainability to regeneration

I have been talking a lot about sustainability, but what is most exciting to me is regeneration. Can people learn to not only live in balance with the land, but to actually foster regeneration through the byproducts of our daily lives? I’m not even sure how specifically to work on this, but I’d like to.

Market based municipal/regional housing strategy

Most municipalities and regions I know of do not take market fluctuations seriously in seeking to preserve the stability of their communities. We know that real estate markets move in cycles, so why not hedge against these movements and the corresponding price fluctuations as a way to help people stay in their homes? Don’t let vulture funds come in, buy low and sell high, exacerbating the problem. Anticipate what investors will do and preempt them.

Progressive financing and community reinvestment

It is often difficult for locals to retain control of their assets: with global financial markets, money flows in an out from all sources. Locals money does not necessarily get reinvested locally. We should seek to provide a wider range of ways for people to reinvest in their communities. We need mechanism that make it simpler for people to implement revolving community loan funds, community-based equity investment, etc. We also need lending based on personal achievements, character and social accountability rather than physical collateral. This model (most know from micro-lending) has been proven effective abroad and should be expanded in the US to be available for the poor, working poor and middle class.

At the national/global level, we should undertake an effort to “brand” capital sources out there. Right now, money chases the highest returns. Some funds focus on a particular region, others on a particular product type, but why not also focus on green building or innovative (no comparables) projects? We need people specializing in these areas as well. And forcing capital sources to brand themselves will apply pressure to the less scrupulous lenders to protect their brands.

Current work

For information on what I am current working on, and have worked on in the past, you can read more here...

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License by Brendan Miller.