Densification issue 2

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Sudane Erato
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Densification issue 2

Post by Sudane Erato »

As promised, I'll put out the issues regarding "owning land" (where using About Land your name appears as owner) and "renting" (where the only evidence of your occupancy is having your name on the tierbox... perhaps then better called a rental box). There's been a lot of misinformation in the discussions about this, so, without taking sides about the overall issue, I'll try to at least get the info straight, and show the pros and cons of making a change like this.

First off, my proposal back months and months ago was only that we consider converting residency WITHIN the walls of Neufreistadt to rentals. This is motivated by the very complexity of the problems surfacing in "Densification issue 1", where my instructions are followed by a number of cautions that others have found true. These are all good points, which are not problems anywhere else in the CDS. So the proposal only applied to the small parcels within the walls of NFS. Since "rentals" are VERY common occupancy arrangements throughout SL, on the face of it it would seem that it may be a good solution for us.

What "rentals" within the walls would mean would be that a citizen would rent a space, defined perhaps in various ways, but defined nonetheless only by our builds... the walls, floors, streets, etc. The parcels which are now the definition of our occupancy wouldn't be relevant, as all the parcels would be owned by the land group (either Land Verwaltung or some other). With your space, the citizen would be allotted a certain number of prims (or LI units), all managed by the rental box. You could easily buy more or scale down as a means of lowering or increasing your rent. The current prim parcels would not be needed.

Some have raised the complaint that without parcel ownership, the renter could no longer control their music stream or their privacy settings. This is not true. So long as we do not "stack" rental units (placing one over the other on a given parcel), there are MANY devices to choose from that we could supply with the rental that give the occupant access to both the music stream and the privacy settings. In addition, there are privacy devices which work completely independent of the parcel, simply excluding people of our choice from defined cubic space (this would work even with stacked spaces).

So... the benefits. Citizens could occupy some of the new crazy spaces in NFS WITHOUT worrying about whether their objects were positioned on the parcel or off of it. We could easily define any number of new and different and interesting spaces as rentals. People could add or subtract their prim capacity (and therefore their monthly rent) to their hearts content. They could also, with certain limits, have the music stream and privacy settings of their choice.

And... the disadvantages. In my opinion, the ONLY but very BIG disadvantage relates to our definition of citizenship. This is a topic, actually, that has been debated in previous years here in our community, and so far the result has always been to reject rentals as a basis for citizenship. There are two objections. One is emotional, and the other technical. Emotionally, one wants to feel a part of a community by owning land here. There has always been the feeling that if you don't own, you don't have the same "stake", the same commitment, the same feeling that this is "my land" and so have this direct connection of responsibility to how the community carries on. (I would point out that despite our system of ownership, 90% of the current and past citizens of the CDS have little if any sense of connection to how our community is managed, with at BEST 50% of them voting whenever we manage to have an election).

The technical problem is not really a problem, but more of a flow. At this time, in order to be a citizen with voting rights (and the right to serve in office), you must both OWN a parcel in your own name and not be in default on any tierbox held in your name (and those two need not be necessarily the same parcel). If you are a renter, you own no parcel, so the only record of your participation is your name on a rentalbox and the tier/rent up to date. It becomes much easier to gain, and drop, citizenship if that is the only requirement.

Anyway, those are the facts, the pros and the cons, in my humble opinion. Please feel free to take issue.

Sudane.....................

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