In het kader van interessante ideeen plaatsen we dit opiniestuk van Khannea Suntzu.
Khannea geniet internationaal bekendheid als activiste en is sinds kort aktief voor de Piratenpartij in Den Haag. De discussie is inmiddels al uitgebarsten op de fora, het merendeel van de redactie had bedenkingen over de inhoud van het stuk en de auteur wilde het stuk zelfs al niet meer hier plaatsen. De sabels zijn van stal gehaald, goed voer voor discussie dus…
I have been fantasizing about the following in a purely hypothetical sense for the Netherlands.
Imagine someone in the Netherlands went into the sea, and settled their boat down over a bank – a row of dunes just off shore, submerged under the sea. And what if this person made a friend come along, and they created a small island there – initially just poles and beams – and built a small house on elevated concrete stilts. Of course the government would object, but let’s say there would be just enough time for a community of several dozen to settle down there, reject the status quo regulations and refuse to be ousted by central state oppression.
Imagine these people would live on elevated weatherproofed containers for one year, but by carefully changing the currents through dumping concrete blocks they would force the sea to deposit sediment, or by whatever ingenuity and luck they’d create the formation of a small island.
Now, building on that idea, there would be an island just outside the normal geographic constraints of the Netherlands. Let's assume the mayor of this small island would be free to attract some investors for experimentation.
The Netherlands is currently mostly defined by government intervention. One part of this intervention is benevolent, but other parts are pathological. A great example of a government pathology caused by over-subsidization is in housing. The housing sector benefits from a reduced tax tariff for mortgages, or “mortgage interest rate reduction”. House owners live on the cheap (or they did initially…) because of this process. They didn’t pay taxes over the purchase (finalization) stage of acquiring a house.
As a result the Dutch are the most over-leveraged population in terms of collective private debt. Why? Because the state likes house owners with high mortgages. It isn’t a conspiracy as such. It isn’t even a feature, more like an evolved bug. No one planned this, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. Employees with high mortgage and housing maintenance costs can not afford to become unemployed or go on strike. They invariably have a wife that also pays a part of the mortgage and that more or less implies they’ll spawn and have their societally benevolent allotment of 2.3 kids. It is self-evident most of these kids will be blue-eyed and blonde in the Netherlands since for some historical and cultural reason those of more skin pigmented persuasion tend to have markedly less access to stable jobs and mortgages.
The end result of this implied government subsidy is sharply inflated prices for land acquisition. The Netherlands (as is Japan) is in sharp competition for real estate and land, and this drives up the price of real estate. This is good for municipal authorities, which collect a considerable tax on the land – and consequently face absolutely no incentive to lower taxes, work to lower land values or otherwise reimburse their citizens. Ever since I have lived in this country of domesticated hobbits I have seen housing prices go up.
So when the international stock markets collapsed in 2008, and we saw the results of the over-financialization game that magically occurred after 9/11, houses started sharply devaluating all over the Netherlands. As a result the acquisition of new houses became scarcer, and sellers had to sell any houses they wanted to sell at a lower rate. Some couples of aforementioned 2.3 children had to sell on account of divorce, and in those cases there often wasn’t much choice.
But in many other cases the banks wouldn’t allow the sale, mostly because of residual debt. The house owners would have secured mortgage well over the actual housing value and as a consequence the banks would not agree to a sale. Why? Because if house owners sell, the bank is left behind with a debt of several tens of thousands of euros, and under Dutch laws it would then make most sense to file for insolvency and have the debt cancelled completely in 3 years. The banks would get a few thousand and be left holding an otherwise empty bag.
But it didn’t limit itself to private housing. The same happened with office space: right now eight million square meters, or 16% of all office space, is vacant. These offices are owned by someone and listed as being of a certain value. This value is clearly fictional. The owners don’t want to reduce rental prices, or sales prices of their empty (and useless) office spaces, because devaluation would mean they have to register that decreased value in their portfolios, and in some cases that might imply immediate insolvency (due to being over-leveraged, largely due to speculating on real estate and stock options before 2008, etc.) of said investment funds.
Nobody in the Netherlands wants to break this stalemate: not the pension funds (who invested in the imaginary value of private mortgage and office spaces), not the local municipal governments (who desperately need every penny of tax money they can get their hands on), and certainly not the owners (who in many cases would be so far under water they might be declared insolvent).
For some time I have been courting the local pirates (for whose and which agenda?), and in that context I have been contemplating playing around with this system, and I think I found a hack.
What if a private fund of investors would work to create an island just along the shore of the Netherlands. This isn’t anything new 1, 2 – it has been happening for decades along the terminal of Rotterdam port. For a large investment entity such as Rotterdam it makes perfect sense to pump up large artificial islands. For private ownership it might be a little too expensive. But lets assume that isn’t the case. Let’s do a little back-of-a-napkin calculation.
Here is the map of the Netherlands and in this article you see the progress of land reclamation. Clearly the project is visible from space. The total cost of the land construction project is about 2.9 billion. If an equivalent amount of real estate would be pumped from the sea and deposited into two strips of equal size along the dutch shore, as was done in Dubai, it couldn’t cost much more, and probably less. This could be done just before the coast of the Hague, Leiden, up to Amsterdam, precisely the parts with the most absurdly inflated real estate prices in the Netherlands. Now let’s assume a million Dutch people have problems finding a really nice house right now, especially a coastal house. And let’s assume real estate prices and municipal taxes would be the biggest problem in this. What if a million Dutch people would collectively shoulder the burden of creating a strip of artificial land from Hoek van Holland, all the way to Noordwijk, add dikes, add forests and add whatever buildings they cared implementing. With dikes, waterworks, roads and several bridges the total cost would probably be less than 10 billion euro. That is a measly sum of ten thousand euros per potential Dutch private investor. That’s pennies on the dollar compared to existing real estate and housing prices.
Now here is where it gets tricky. The people who might contemplate living there would want very cheap high quality housing. As it happens, a whole new industry of cheap and extremely high quality housing is starting to emerge right now, with 3D printed houses 1, 2). The production costs of a damn big house could be lowered from half a million euros to probably less than fifty thousand euros, including quality plumbing, great isolated sea-view windows and anything else that is a house these days. The point is to get rid of monopolies. Ignore existing inflated Dutch real estate money-sharks and implement a totally independent building infrastructure. Attract a mass of Eastern European workers and ignore local building permits, regulations and annoyingly constructive Hobbiton Dutch neighborly zoning laws – this is a totally new country, right? You can do pretty much anything you want here.
A strip of coastal real estate like this would introduce a million new high quality houses in the real estate mix. You’d be fishing for low cost building companies all throughout the European Union, and bypass and ignore any local nuisance, high cost, builders. Paste the whole stretch of coastline full of fast growing trees and all, a seamless line of wind-turbines and robust weatherproofed solar arrays along the seaward dike, offering anyone living there vastly reduced electricity costs year round.
The municipal governments from any part of the Randstad would be terrified of such a plan, and would respond with hysteria and hostility. Banks, investors, pension funds, owners of expensive homes – all would respond with horror. If this were implemented in ten years, by the tenth year housing costs in the western half of the Netherlands would be dropping like a brick, because a lot of people would want to sell in a hurry. And that is where the real fight would start. In setting up this project the people bidding for housing would probably get funding from Chinese and Russians, who are currently swimming in oil money and very little space to invest world wide. By getting foreign financing the investing Dutch would bypass local banks, and probably get substantially more attractive rates in the process. But still local and state governments would put up a fight, as this plan destroys the precariously exploitative high tax rate nest egg the Dutch money elites create to their own benefit. The plan would be a painful legal battle all the way to the last house under construction, but the battle would be well worth it. Sea-side coastal housing in the west facing the sea, or on the east facing a newly created inland lake as big as the IJsselmeer. With very large houses, very favorable real estate permits and lax building codes, using completely new and experimental 3D house printing technologies that would otherwise not be legal on mainland Netherlands for decades.
Afterword
I wrote this article in the spirit of Pirate thinking, and as my first conceptual submission to kick off my burgeoning involvement with the Pirate party of the Netherlands. Because that is what the Pirate way of life is all about – new technologies, opening up new frontiers, breaking open established laws, opposing exploitative and predatory status quo, and shedding unreasonable rules. But most of all it is to use ingenuity to offer people opportunities for increased freedom and substantially better lifes. There’s still hope for the future, but these days you have to part the seas to actually realize this ambition.
Signed,
Khannea Suntzu
NB: Bovenstaand stuk is geredigeerd op stijl, spelling en grammatica, waardoor de auteur de toestemming tot plaatsing expliciet heeft ingetrokken, maar later impliciet heeft hersteld. Op basis hiervan is het stuk alsnog geplaatst. Door een later herschreven versie door de auteur komt bovenstaande versie niet meer overeen met de uiteindelijke versie die de auteur op haar eigen blog heeft geplaatst.
I’m not sure if selling ourselves to the Russians and Chinese is the best way forward for us “domesticated hobbits”.
Dear Khannea Suntzu,
What you imply is if a million people would work together, this problem could be solved instantly.
Well what we know is that a million people rarely work together to solve anything.
The effords it would require to get those people to work together would simply be to extensive.
Now, what I would advise you to do, is to start a small scale efford instead.
With something really cheap.
Let´s say most second hand containers are pretty mutch free.
Cargo gets transported somewhere, the containers are then so cheap for the company to buy anew,
it just doesn´t reward the trading firms enough to reclaim the old ones.
This there is a solid second hand option for this one. You can house youreself in the containers, that are easy to
modify to customer needs, inside and outside.
You can start a tetris-like structure where you can connect separate blocks and move them around inside a superstructure.
Then, there is the matter of where.
As you said, the dutch governments involvement is pathological. And I fear the dutch economic exclusive zone prohibits living offshore. Starting a new country however, can get done, the islandplatorm nation is an alternative, simply joining with them can provide flag and country.
So, what you could do is this ..step plan.
Step 1. register a sizable ship with a micronation, after checking wich one is most suited to the job.
Step 2. housing plan. Weather its more favourable to park outside of the tenmile zone, or go into port each morning, is yet another matter for jurists to be solved.
Step 3. Attract enthousiasts. Weather it´s kelpfarming, fishfarming, harvesting free plastic for re-use in a plastic printer, etc. there is plenty of economic opportunity out there in the north sea. One problem is however, that is ís essentially illegal to use the dutch economic exclusive zone for a reason that´s probably somewhere in your tekst already Khannea..
But im sure that if you can avoid the use of regular money, and or other things to get around the economics blocade by the law and the 3 parties making the block possible.. economic activity might be harder to prove than those 3 parties think.
Otherwise, keep me informed.
Ketejan.
that is (almost) racism?
“Employees with high mortgage and housing maintenance costs can not afford to become unemployed or go on strike. They invariably have a wife that also pays a part of the mortgage and that more or less implies they’ll spawn and have their societally benevolent allotment of 2.3 kids. It is self-evident most of these kids will be blue-eyed and blonde in the Netherlands since for some historical and cultural reason those of more skin pigmented persuasion tend to have markedly less access to stable jobs and mortgages.”
” It is self-evident […]” this is evidence of racistic blabla.
Racism always justifies itself with itself ” It is self-evident “.
Nationlism is a form a racism. Kinda racism based on language and culture and significantly always covered with pseudo-scientific argumentations and statistics.