Proposed Group Land Ownership Bill

[Jon Seattle]

This extends the option of land ownership in Neufreistadt to couples
and groups of citizens. Among others, this allows joint ownership of
land by people in committed relationships, social, educational, and
religious organizations.

1. Plots of land in Neufreistadt may be owned by couples or groups of
citizens. All members must be citizens before joining the group.

2. A member's citizenship is maintained if the area of the group land
divided by the number of citizen members plus any Neufreistadt land
that the citizen owns outside of group is equal or more than 128 m2.

3. If the citizen leaves a land holding group they have two months to
reestablish their holdings to meet the above criteria.

[Claude Desmoulins]

Hmm. A first thought here.....

If we hold confiscation of land as an important criminal penalty, what happens if one person in a group holding land is convicted of something and legally ordered to forfeit land? Is the parcel split?

Also what if a parcel is in arrears on land fee payment? Do all the citizens whose citizenship is tied to that parcel get "suspended"?

[Pelanor Eldrich]

Is there anything in this legislation that would stop me from creating de facto microplots in the following manner.

A group of say 16 small business owners buy a single 128m2 called "Small Business Association". Do not these owners become de facto microplot holders like in the ancien regime? Thanks!

[Claude Desmoulins]

The way I read this, there must be 128m2 of land per citizen. So if 16 owners wanted to be citizens, they would have to buy a 2048m2 plot.

I can't believe this, but I'm starting to come round to your point of view on this. If 128m2 is the lower limit, it's low enough that someone could consider it a throwaway investment should they wish to do something nefarious. Why not then just charge a $1.11 USD monthly head tax. Ostensibly the answer is, to assure the sim is paid for. I'm not sure how well this works in fact.

[Sudane Erato]

We should be aware that if there is no longer a direct relationship between the land that an individual citizen owns and the fact of their citizenship, the almost to be released new software for Land Management will no longer be expandable to handle citizen accounts.

The Land Management system accomplishes its tasks by scanning for and maintaining data on each parcel of land. The stage about to be completed uses that system for convenient, clear and easily accessible information about the parcels that make up the sim, and enables the generation of deeds for those. As such, it would work with the proposed bill.

But Stage Two of the LMS project was intended to be the extension of the database to support individual accounts for each citizen. If the direct correspondence between citizen and land is broken, the extension of the LMS system into personal accounts is no longer possible.

Sudane.....

[Pelanor Eldrich]

This landless citizen dreck of mine is not in the DPU platform and I doubt the DPU will propose any such bill this term. If the CSDF does, we'd have to get at least one DPU vote behind it to pass.

So, it's just an acadmic discussion. Let's not panic.

Actually the sim would be paid for, say 90% of it from land use, and 10% from head tax. The advantage here is no upper limit on # of citizens/sim. As it stands the limit is 65,536/128 = 512, but the practical limit with usable land is 50-60 citizens/sim. The other advantage, of course, is that now you have cheaper monthly land use fees. For the real estate owner, that's a big deal. My expected result is an increase in land market purchase price due to demand, this also benefits the CDS when land is sold citizen to citizen.

One fear here is a deluge of new landless citizens. Upsetting politics, peeing in alleyways, playing loud music and griefing. I doubt it. At $4.29 + $1.11/month per resident, I can only hope many arrive.

So landless citizens is a way to boost CDS monthly revenue without having potential revenue hard capped by CDS land owned (m2).

[Jon Seattle]

Claude and Sudane raise technical issues that are easily dealt with. So first for those:

1. The number of people in a group, and the land owned by the group establish the fact of citizenship. There is nothing about this bill that changes land fees in any way. (Since business can already own land.) So the accounting system need not be changed.

2. It makes sense that if land is sold of confiscated that it can no longer be used for citizenship.

3. Under a “criminal penaltyâ€

[Claude Desmoulins]

[quote="Sudane Erato":9qyb1y6r]
But Stage Two of the LMS project was intended to be the extension of the database to support individual accounts for each citizen. If the direct correspondence between citizen and land is broken, the extension of the LMS system into personal accounts is no longer possible.

.[/quote:9qyb1y6r]

To be fair to Jon here, The system already allows a one to many relationship between citizens and parcels (a citizen may own multiple lots) and a one to many relationship between parcels and citizens (groups - MoCA, etc. may own single parcels, but these group owned parcels do not serve as the basis for any person's citizenship.)

The expansion of the system which Jon proposes is about the legal standard of citizenship more than about something which would require extensive software reengineering.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

[quote="Jon Seattle":b2732ysd]
Which no one ever reads. Take a look at Article 17.

[quote:b2732ysd](1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.[/quote:b2732ysd]

So we are bound by our own constitution to provide for group ownership of land. And since land ownership is currently tied to citizenship, we have a moral obligation to allow couples and groups to obtain citizenship by this means.[/quote:b2732ysd]

On the other hand, no citizen truly 'owns' any portion of Neufreistadt, even collectively; the actual legal arrangement is that we rent from Linden Lab. Thus, I see no inherent obligation.

As I have said in another thread, let's not mistake the metaphor for the reality.

I'm also less-than-impressed by the comment that 'nobody ever reads the UDHR', considered many of us greatly familarized ourselves with it during the Ulrika matter.

That said, I don't actually disagree with Jon, although the microplot act already has provision for this. (One can deed several plots to one SL group, despite the plots being 'owned' by individual citizens in our records. The microplot proposal explicitly names microplots being joined to normal plots, but I see no reason multiple normal plots could not be joined.)