By Tom & Carol Braford
We were recently notified that we are in the running for a $2,000,000 Housing Solutions Grant being offered by a major international foundation that will virtually guarantee that our long anticipated projects will finally sprint to the finish line, especially because the founder has publicly expressed his preference for comprehensive climate solutions.
Luckily for them and conveniently for us, we are offering a comprehensive Housing Solution that gets us all the way there with our 7 breakthrough technologies that address all 4 housing production levers, the Housing Solution part, and more than halfway there as a Climate Solution as well. We especially need your support in addressing #4, a just and equitable environmental and climate sustainable local housing production policy.
The challenge is that our community development sites are no longer marginally desirable places to live, but are now sandwiched between two of the hottest redevelopment areas in the City. Unfortunately, many parts of the City seem to be working on behalf of more established status quo developers and are taking action against us small-fry.
Luckily, there is power in numbers and there are a lot more of us than there are of them, so if we come together quickly, as the saying goes, the people united will never be defeated.
The most effective way to blunt these blocking efforts is to have this be a comprehensive opportunity for reconstituted breakthrough communities. We invite all of you to step up and join this big tent conglomerate of worker-owned, permanent family wage jobs. We will create divisions of Irresistible Community Builders that will build out 4 contiguous cohousing and cooperatively owned communities. We will create permanent on-site co-op owned businesses that will build out these and other co-ops to operate permanently from the Central West End and our satellite smaller community in Fox Park. All will be connected by the growing raised guideway Rapid Alternative Freight & Transit System (RAFT) that will link Islands of Coherence Communities of Practice, throughout our region and beyond.
The sooner we fill these community based family wage job positions, business, housing and the investment in the sustainable future opportunities that these developments represent, the more secure these prototype projects that we have so painstakingly put together over decades will now quickly move to secure completion.
The Balancing Act!
The thing about innovative comprehensive solution projects like ours is: 1) It is an everything everywhere all at once proposition that 2) requires an everything everywhere all at once set-up for this set of actual realizable interrelated opportunities, which will 3) result in considerable necessary overlap between the setup and delivery and it also 4) involves a rapidly closing window of opportunity once everything starts to move, resulting in the proverbial early birds getting the biggest juiciest worms.
Through a combination of a consistently growing sense of mission, sheer dedication and endurance on our part, along with extreme faith and perseverance of our longtime supporters, investors and well wishers and more than a little dumb luck and coincidental good timing, I believe we are at the threshold of compound opportunities for all who are able to muster the nerve and resources to hold on for a little longer or freshly jump on board.
The setup: The fact that we are still standing with virtually ready to go breakthrough housing, climate and a myriad of other solution community based projects that are now collectively sitting on top of two of the hottest community redevelopment sites in St. Louis bodes well for our collective success.
I say collective because, even though Carol and I have the biggest financial and time investment at risk in the project, others have substantial faithful time and money investments as well that at this point could not be honored if properties fall victim to forced as is sale or seizure aimed at creating windfall profits for better connected developers, but they will be easily honored as we intend as we move forward.
Similarly, new social and environmental impact investors, buyers and new ICB employees on their way to being worker owners, employees of forming on-site co-op businesses all benefit in multiple ways.
All for sale condo purchasers also benefit from discounts made possible by 4 separate Neighborhood Preservation Act Tax credit awards totaling $7.2M that lower the cost of production. The sooner you reserve a home, buy and take possession, the bigger the benefits and the bigger the variety to choose from.
Similarly, buyers interested in the social and economic advantages of co-operative ownership have the option of co-op ownership in 5 different 5 and 6 bedroom multibath homes. One, Lisi’s House, is designed for the alternatively abled and includes some bedrooms with sleeping lofts for live-in caregivers. There are also several 1 or 2 person tiny homes.
All co-op and condo buyers will also have the benefit of affordable on-site produced and maintained energy systems, year-round on-site organic food production, renewable energy systems and access to the Green Electron powered Transportation and Freight Co-op on-site and other co-op owned businesses and scheduled use common facilities.
We look forward to hearing from you. Contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.
Also, check out this website, www.libraphilanthropies.org. We can help you qualify if you decide to apply.