From the Founder:
This is the alley I walk from my house to the House Kombucha factory each day. The only thing that separates my home from my work is this less fashionable street food outreach and busy 6th Street.
6th Street, San Francisco's very own skid row, the featured slum in the movie production of Rent, is a place of amazing struggle. This is where food pantries and drop in clinics abound. This is where millions of dollars of drugs are dealt each year in plain view. This is where I tip toe past my homeless neighbors sleeping on the sidewalk in the cold San Francisco rain.
Who can feel whole when there is poverty on the doorstep? I know HouseKombucha's first priority is to make good kombucha and sell it. But bootstrapping a beverage start-up is hard and it will be a long while until we have liberal cash flow. In the meantime, it turns out we are already making great profits socially. We have pulled together amazing human resources to help open the front section of our factory into a beautiful probiotic/macrobiotic cafe!
The current window front. Art by Rattlecanblasters.com
Turning a vacant warehouse into a factory is one thing, transforming it further into a thriving non-profit community cafe is yet another.
Opening a little consciousness cafe will certainly shoo away the drug pushers and homeless from our street corner. It will provide a few jobs and, when we are successful, actually work to drive up land values, gentrify our neighborhood and further deepen the divide between the rich and the poor.
I state this, not to be sarcastic, but to be plainly honest. Hopeful people are naturally driven to work hard and make improvements in their neighborhoods. However, gentrification drives up the value of private property, which then causes increased rent, evictions, land speculation (this is when buildings are purposely held vacant or in disrepair based on the expectation of a high sale price in the future), and socially draining booms and busts. So while the beautification of 6th Street is a lovely goal, without Justice, our efforts will result in creating a place that can only be enjoyed by those who can afford it, rather than those who by living and working through it, created it.
The solution to this problem is something I call Common Rent. It's based on the work of Henry George. It honors entrepreneurs and businesses and yet provides amply for the commons. It is neither purely capitalistic nor communist. It something quite new to understand, yet so logical and readily discernable; it's like discovering the existence of gravity.
Common Rent recognizes that when a piece of property increases in value based on location alone, it is due to the social gravity of that community. Social gravity is the force created by the desirability of a society. It is another way of understanding that increased property values is a measure of community generated wealth.
Common Rent allows for private landownership but conditions it upon payment of common rent, the market value of its ground-rent (i.e. location value). It is like property tax, but it makes a clear distinction between value based on location alone and improvements on top of the land. You are not taxed for building or buying a house, but you have to pay for the right to use the land beneath it. Value generated by community should be collected for the community. Value created by individuals (buildings, farms, manufacturing) are the property of the individual and would never be included in common rent.
To socialize land values by taxing property based on its full locational values would make land speculation and investing in real estate obsolete. It would also provide enough money to the city to make all other taxes unnecessary. The combined effect of freeing workers from income taxes with freeing under-utilized land from speculating landlords would together increase employment and wealth.
Some will say that, of course the privatization of land is the root of the existence of oppression, but it will never end. In the words of Henry George, "For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong". Radical transformation of everything that is wrong can, in fact, be achieved by relatively simple legislation and no major change in government. Nonetheless, a deep understanding by all citizens is required for any change to take root.
Thus, I part of my give-back to the community will be in teaching commons economics and bringing about a Movement based on sharing the bounty our natural resources and socially created world.
So to the meek who shall inherit the earth: let’s put our minds together and prepare. With a new ideological party brewing in the kombucha basement and a café forming in the front who doesn’t want to get involved?
Send me your words.
Rana
view from 6th and Natoma at dusk