Pretty fucking soon, I hope. As soon as we can secure funding, Hudson and I will start visiting properties and doing due diligence on water access, well depths, water tables, water rights (a lot of shit about water), soil, solar potential, covenants, zoning, road access, and all the other things you have to learn when buying undeveloped land.

In an ideal world, I’d like to start looking for land in summer 2023! But in all likelihood, summer 2024 is a more realistic goal.

Awesome! The fewer people sharing the land and resources, the better. And a nice homesteader plot for a small family should be a minimum of 4 acres anyway. I’d prefer if more people invested in a few acres and the community stayed smaller, but I’m trying to make this dream as accessible as possible.

Or if you’d like to join Hudson and me in becoming a primary owner and having more agency (and land) in this process, send me a message.

I think we could definitely do a family deal. A 4-acre bundle for $12,000?

Fuck it, why not.

Welp, in 10 years those kids may be adults, so we have to keep it at one acre per person right now. If everyone suddenly had 4 people on their acre, there would be 1,200 people! And this is a resources game at the end of the day.

That being said, who knows what it all looks like when the time comes.

Don’t stress it–we’ll figure it out. For now, count any babies or kids you already have, or any buns in the oven. If you get pregnant or adopt as things develop over the next couple years, just shoot me an email and we’ll chat about it.

I sure hope a lot of wonderful, like-minded people who care about the planet and love nature and realize we’ve lost touch with who we really are as humans. I hope it’s people who are starting to see the overworked lives we’re leading in a late-stage capitalist society obsessed with consumption and putting the accumulation of wealth above all else are making us miserable—and they’re destroying our only home while they’re at it.

Do you like your neighbors now? Do you even know your neighbors now? There are a lot of unknowns in an idea this big and risky, and this is one of them.

Before contracts get finalized, I’m going to do a little vetting of all the contributors and ask everyone to write a few short essay questions about why they’re interested, who they are, and stuff like that. If some shitty people end up joining this cause, we’re gonna have to deal with that when it comes to light. We are reserving the right to buy anyone out at any time. For now, I’m going to continue believing that the people who would invest their hard-earned money in this are people who share the same values that we do. (Flat earthers, QAnon believers, and dark triad personality types need not apply.)

No. As I said, this “acre” is a concept as part of the bigger piece of land. We’re not doing surveys and parceling out spots. The land we buy will have enough acreage so that there is an acre or more per person. How much of that is buildable, arable, whatever, remains to be seen. But there will be room for everyone. You can’t buy one acre and build a wall around it and share it with your friends. It’s about pooling our funds to buy an incredible piece of land with sustainable, sharable resources that none of us could afford otherwise.

As there can’t be a deed, I have been looking into easements in gross, which grant an individual specified access to a piece of private property. I may have a contract drawn up that spells out those access rights for each investor, but it’s possible this is cost prohibitive, as lawyers cost a lot of money, and multiplying whatever that number is by 300 people is probably too much. The cost of writing up the easement alone could be over $2,500.

This is just a bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it. We can’t write up an easement without owning the property in the first place. But with or without a deed or easement, you will have a guaranteed spot when the time comes. You’re just gonna have to trust me.

Of course! But trying to find one with water access and arable land and beautiful mountains for less than $4,000 isn’t gonna be easy. At the end of the day, this isn’t just about the land. If you want to go build your bug out house–go on ahead, more power to you. IOUtopia is about people who are interested in leveraging community resources together. Who are willing to learn these things together.

We’re going to create a buyout plan for years 5–25 with a limited number of cashouts available per year at an interest rate of 2%. These will be available on a first-come-first-served basis. If you miss this year’s allotment, you’ll have to wait for next year. But you have to commit to the first four years. I’ll have a lawyer person write up something a little more official for this.

It’s important to note here that we have to make an assumption that not everyone will want to cash out. We don’t have a million dollars—obviously—and as a teacher and a freelance writer, we’re not likely to anytime soon. But we do understand that some people are gonna need this money back, whether to buy their own land or for whatever else, and we’re creating a path to do that.

I think ideally we can start with 300 investors, we’ll plan on 100 bowing out, and then there will be more land for everyone!

If you’d like to look at this as a 5- or 8- or 10-year, 2% loan to us, with no plans of ever moving to the property, that’s cool too. Just let us know from the get-go, and we’ll sign you up for a repayment date.

All that being said, this is an investment, and investments carry risk.

Of course, my horse! When you contribute your share, you’ll agree to the terms & conditions which will spell out all the deets we know now (about financing and repayment options as well as our requirements for buying and developing the land).

It just won’t involve legal access to the land because there’s no way to feasibly do that until we own it. Nor would I do that until I know how this all shakes out.