Businesses I would start no. 2

There’s a story this morning about how the US Senate plans to lower the loan rates for students borrowing money to attend college:

“Under the deal, undergraduates this fall could borrow at a 3.9 percent interest rate. Graduate students would have access to loans at 5.4 percent, and parents would be able to borrow at 6.4 percent. Those rates would climb as the economy improves and it becomes more expensive for the government to borrow money.”

To me, that arrangement seems backward because the rates are tied to how well the economy in general is doing, rather than how reasonably an individual student can be expected to pay back her loan over the long run, a scenario which might not involve continued economic growth.

Instead I propose one of the following of these plans:

1. Privatize the college loan market to the extent that companies pay for students’ college educations in exchange for working at the company for a certain number of years after college, similar to the way the military will do so for its recruits.  That way, students don’t have to graduate not knowing whether or not they’ll be able to find employment (AND PAY OFF THEIR LOAN), and may be more motivated to use the college experience in a way that maximizes their educational outcomes.

Downsides: Where will the English majors be hired?  This plan would probably tend to encourage people to graduate in STEM fields which, while important, might lead to the decline of the humanities as a viable option for study.  (Please await my future post(s) on redeveloping college curricula!)  Were I to actually develop such a system, I would try hard to integrate a heavy emphasis on training teachers.  (Please await my future post(s) on public education!)

2a. Create nonprofit lending agencies.  (This is, at the moment, my umbrella solution to all of the world’s development issues, regardless of its feasibility.)  These agencies would have no incentive to make lots of profit – no shareholders (assuming that’s a legitimate business structure) – so money could be lent at low rates because interest would only be used to provide more funding down the line.

Downsides: I know nothing about the 501(c)3 status of nonprofits and what laws govern the ability of nonprofits to lend money.

2b. Create crowdsourced (or distributed) lending agencies.  People with some money to donate charitable could give to an organization that in turn funds college students’ tuition.  By following the more-people-smaller-donations parallel processing route, loans could be provided in such a way as to encourage community investment in the future of the community.  By giving charitably, in the mode of a donor advised fund, people would forgo expecting a short term return on their investment by instead expecting a long term investment in the form of broader economic and social development.  It’s possible that such a scheme would be only able to provide partial loans to students, depending on the size of the pot available through donations, but some is better than nothing.   Loan rates would be set at 2% because that seems reasonable to me.

What laws would need to change or be made to help these ideas work?  Which option makes the most sense?

Businesses I would start no.1

This business is contingent upon

a) having at least 1 billion dollars in available capitol (e.g., pretend I started Facebook instead of the other dude).

b) you knowing where Kaimuki is.  See below:

Kaimuki is a Honolulu neighborhood that has been developed for residential housing from the 1920s onward.  I also live there and despair of ever being able to afford a home there, as the median home price is ~$750,000.  Currently, this neighborhood is undergoing the same sort of teardown construction that’s prevalent elsewhere across the US.  Hawai’i has limited space on which to build new residential housing, so tear downs are a logical way to refurbish existing residential areas.  However, the building practice is coupled with the intent of landowners to maximize the development potential of their lots.  Which means concrete – lots and lots of concrete to tear down houses like this and instead build houses like this.

There are a variety of problems that I see with this development strategy:

– Landlords trying to fit as many rental properties onto one lot, which sometimes involves skirting permitting laws and/or takes advantage of the fact that many people can only afford to rent housing, and will often rent terrible spaces because they are the only affordable ones.  That’s why one of my neighbors has a studio in a garage… attached to another garage so that it doesn’t look like a studio… with a garage door as his entrance.

– The more impermeable concrete used to cover up land, the more runoff there is and the corresponding less fresh water there is to restock the water table.

– The more impermeable concrete used to cover up land, the less green space there is, whether in terms of trees, lawns (not my favorite thing either), and gardens.  That means my semi-arid area will get hotter and drier, all the while flooding occasionally down the street (see runoff above)…

– This is a more personal objection, but one which I hope can also be generalized to other people: ugly houses don’t inspire me to live in or invest in areas with ugly houses.  Sorry.

So if I had a billion dollars:

– I would create a company that would buy up residential real estate, meaning – for my purposes – primarily single-family homes (rather than apartment buildings or condos).  These lots would not necessarily be coterminous (next to each other), but over time this company would continue to purchase land, adjoining where possible.

– I would (haha!) bulldoze houses that were so large as to block out green space and/or grossly maximize lot occupancy.  Or that were not up to my aesthetic standards.

– I would build houses that satisfy green building criteria and maximize community connectedness (shared outdoor space, multipurpose spaces).  Should I be able to acquire adjoining lots, there would be more potential to build houses that help foster a sense of community and neighborliness, perhaps by including shared play areas, bbq and eating areas, and communal gardens.  Building more than one house would also help me build relationships with local contractors, the end goal being to increase the amount of green home building and, in doing so, decrease its costs.

– I would lease the houses to occupants – not rent – focusing only on long term leasehold arrangements.  I.e., 20+ years.

– Leases would be affordable, tied in some way to lessee’s income.  That’s my way of crafting affordable housing that’s relative to what someone earns.

– After the end of the lease, occupants would be able to stay in the house for free to the end of their lives.  Houses would not be owned, and therefore not heritable.  However, occupants would still have an incentive to care for and maintain the home according to company standards because…

– There would be a property management wing of the company that would inspect houses 1-2x per year.  Leases would, in some part, be contingent on home upkeep.  In other words, noncompliance with home maintenance would result in fines or loss of the lease.  Yearly inspections would also help to catch infrastructure problems before they become big problems.

– There may be an option to decrease the amount of the lease-rent if occupants put additional work into their homes, such as actively maintaining a garden, an orchard, or helping to provide home maintenance for other lessees, such as the elderly.

– The money necessary to fund the property management would come from lease-rent and fines.  All other profits would be reinvested in the company in order to continue buying more property and building better homes.

– This would be a nonprofit company.  If I already have a billion dollars, I don’t need much more, even if I sink much/most of it into a crazy DIY affordable housing scheme.

Tell me what else I’d need to carry out this plan, pending, um, funding.

Laws I would make no.1

(If I were a dictator, or a unipersonal government.)

*Everyone must either
– ride a bicycle
– take public transportation

The intent of this law would not necessarily be to outlaw cars. Instead, it would be intended to cultivate a perspective on the part of citizens that would value road ways as a shared resource, rather than as a personal prerogative.

The public transportation in question would, of course, be top notch and highly functional. As dictator/unipersonal government officer, I would pass additional law to make it so.

(I also confess that I do think about pushing over cyclists who break traffic laws, like running red lights.  My bias is for efficiency and consideration, rather than a particular mode of transportation.  Although, as a cyclist myself, I guess there’s some implicit bias there.)

UPDATE:

I would allow citizens to purchase permits to drive themselves to places that may be less accessible by public transportation.  That system would probably work like a ZipCar system, with cars that would be shared between users.

I would also allow businesses to own and use vehicles, pending review of their needs.  (This whole idea would probably have a large staff behind it.)

It would be tres cheap/free to use this public transit system, due to being publicly funded by tax dollars.  The money saved on road maintenance and streamlining road design would also be factored into the project’s costs.  And then citizens would save on fuel, insurance, and vehicle costs.

Papers I would write no.1

Re: Science fiction and/or fantasy

How would post colonial theories apply to these genres?

– The other, obviously.  -aliens  -imaginary indigenous ppls

– What about the idea of encountering otherness at all, as an expectation the reader has when choosing to read the book?

–> Is this something that other narrative traditions create space for in other ways, like myth-that-is-real, or the real lives of gods & divinity

– Is the expectation for adventure, otherness, exploration in itself bad?  or colonial/colonizing?

–> Is this negative if no one inhabited that place previously?

– Scifi especially has a common theme of searching for truth about enlightenment.  Does that happen at the expense of literary theories of  political or social justice?

–> Apocalypse/postapocalypse: re-inhabiting (colonizing –> becoming native in a changed environment) that which revealed its secrets

–> Ultimate, destructive.  Volcanic creativity.

– When these magical concepts of scifi become real, will we honor the foresight of authors by using their terms?  E.g., hyperspace, warp drive?  Psychohistory?

Books to use:

A Canticle for Lebowitz, Walter Miller

Pure, Julianna Baggott

Invitation to the Game, Monica Hughes