Alright
Wish you good luck with your project.
I have a couple of comments here. It is not an attack but more of some food for thought. Perhaps it could narrow down your project in some way and granted some of it is a little off-topic.
I am all for free-market solutions of voluntary people coming together to create their own commonalities and purchasing their own property to do so.
When you say you would like to democratize property in the US, that is a entirely different matter. If you are referring to confiscation or nationalization of property, or government funded property (having to steal resources from others) to make that a reality, that itself proves that your idea is not sustainable at all. If you are for nationalization of property, you are no better than a common thief.
Regarding the communities themselves, have you ever owned property for rental?
Owning property for rent is not free money. There are taxes (many) water and sewage, elect bills, insurance, accountant fees, bad tenants, evictions, being on call 24/7 for problems, fines, rent collection, trash, legal cost, rodents, maintaining the property, finding tenants, and over time properties fully decay (if not consistently replaced) which means a house or building is consistently completely replaced over time. The profit from owning a property is for arranging all of that in a successful manner and is a payment for that service provided to other people being able to rent.
Real yields (not nominel) in the top catagory of property is like 1/3% with 5/6% in supbar categories with added risk. That is what the vast majority of property ends up with (and that is your salery btw for being responsible for providing all the services I mentioned) somebody has to do that, no matter how you arrange property ownership somebody has to be paid for providing these services and responsibilities.
Which is why many choose to rent, rather than own a property and in many cases that is actually the cheapest option. Owning a portfolio of properties or a apartment build means you can build more for less + being able to have maintenance on retainers and rebates with service providers for scale service.
The profit is also needed for actually incentive building property, if there was no return on investment, there is no capital available for sustaining or building property. Remember people have to under consume (not buy shiet with their money for their own good) to invest into property and the only way someone would do that, was if that could mean they could consume more in the future. Many yields on rental property at the moment are between 3/5% realistically, which is not a lot. There are higher caps out there, but they are only high due to bad areas, but they do not take into account all the problems you have to face.
One of the reasons we have a high rent cost in the US compared to other places in the world is because cities are funded through property taxes and they have high individual expenses. Many people do not know this. In most nations the cities do not operate police, school, fire, etc etc. That is done on a federal level. Which means that the high rent cost is just a shuffling around of what would else have been much higher taxes on income - a huge portion of peoples rent are property taxes, the city/state I am in it is 20% of rent!
There is no free lunch, rent will always be there if you want to live in quality and desirable housing. The only way to make it cheaper, would be cutting down productions costs through new technology. In fact housing is pretty cheap outside big cities, it is just people choose not to want to live there cause they would rather be in the cities. Demand/supply increases the prices then. If you removed this component, all you do is create huge waiting lists. I come from a country where we do have some government property, and it is with 10/15 years waiting lists. This is not something you want all over the place, trust me.
Your idea of tokenizing it, is really already done, its called cash. Which is what we measure the value of things with, and make things sustainable.
You really already have this, if you are talking a community where the inhabits still own their property. Its called condo-associations. You each own your apartment, but pay a condo fee for general stuff and vote on what needs to be done.
Now if your idea with is creating a fully communist community that can already be done today, just get a group of people together and purchase some land and you are free to set up whatever rules you want among each other. Aswell as implementing your own token. I am totally down with that, just do not force me or anything else to participate as I am fine with a free system where we both get to do our thing. Examples of these communities exist, I know some personally who live that way, where all income is shared, and everything is done on a community level. Bigger communities like the Amish exist aswell.
Not many do so and not many do so, because Its usually not a great living and the only way to pull it off is to have a very cohesive community with people who think a particular way. Usually they are tied up together by religion but it wouldn’t have to be. I have never seen any voluntary communist communities though, perhaps ideology is not enough to bound them together. Which also speaks to why This cannot be done on a broad level though, since production and development of more complex things would grind to a complete halt.
The last point about sustainability and environmentalism - that is a entire other debate but to put it short. Everything there is on earth, stays on earth. Nothing is lost, and nothing is created. We are merely shuffling around usage of what is here. We cannot use up our water, steal, rocks, cement, wood, plastic, whatever. Which is why any subsequent environmental issues is completely solvable by developments in technology, everything here is moldable. There is no need for humans to live a modest life, or having a defeatist attitude of degress, instead we should strive to develop and overcome these hurdles instead of limiting ourselves. That is what we have always done, and it is what brought us here today far from living barbaric and horrible life in caves, and whatever came with it.
The universe is immense, all of its resources at our disposable we just need to rise to the task. In fact, the only invention we really need to make is true scaleble AI- The invention that unlocks all inventions - that will solve any problem we can imagine - it might also have created a new one though.