The Australian government fund plan.

For almost all of human history, people lived in small groups of people they knew. A history documentary I keep coming back to puts it at 97% of our time on earth: strongly egalitarian groups that helped each other and resisted anyone who tried to rule or hoard. The sanction was simple: the group could leave, and the one who was greedy or coercive ended up alone. Nobody else was isolated, because nobody lived or worked among strangers. On this land, Aboriginal people lived that way for tens of thousands of years, and I write this with respect for that. It is also what my own ancestors' culture was, before it turned into the one I live in.

What changed is recent. In the last 3% of human existence we made permanent settlements where people owned land, and a person found something to do inside it, or belonged to a group that did. In the last 200 years, industry and the nation took over from the village: people stopped doing things locally, and kings and landowners put them to work for rations or a wage. Governments took over from the kings wanting people to work, rather than asking how people could work, and be part of a community, where they live. Space went from communal, to locally owned, to a vast area where nobody knows each other. Today a home is bought and sold to whoever can pay, so the people next to you are strangers chosen by price, and leaving costs more than most of us will ever have. That, to me, is one of the main causes of isolation: how homes are bought and sold.

None of this means getting rid of homes, home ownership or work. It means putting back the one thing that was lost: being able to live and work among people you chose, and to leave when it is wrong, without losing your home or your income. People once built their homes where they wanted, next to their friends, and did work that was useful to the group they cared about. The plan below is that, inside today's system of ownership and work.

• People choose their neighbours. That is the whole idea; everything else is supplementary.
• Homes that are paid off, not rented. A person pays off a room or an apartment, whichever fits their budget, at about 30% of their income, on the home's original value plus inflation. Someone who starts with a room can upgrade to an apartment later.
• Some homes are always kept free, so a group of friends can keep growing and anyone can move at any time. A move is a name change on the papers, not a sale. A custom AI system does the matching and the paperwork; people make the choices.
• A cheap addition: a work app for local jobs. People switch themselves to “available” and take local casual work whenever they like, often with their friends. Work and things to do exist because the people around them are there.
• Repayments buy the next homes. The money goes round. If the plan fails, the property is still there, and the money comes back out of it.

1. Fund or part-fund one pilot: a converted building or a cluster of cheap houses in one town, where people choose their neighbours and pay off their homes.
2. Fund the work app. It is cheap, because it is an addition to the matching app already built and running at chooseneighbors.com, and it is the part that gives people something to do the week they arrive.
3. Fund the building plan, so that building the homes is the first work. New apartments and rooms are built by the people who will live there and by residents who want building work, whenever they like, through the work app, with a skilled supervisor checking the work. The first people to move in can be the ones interested in that work: they build the next apartments while paying off their own. The fronted costs of each home (the slab, licensed trades and permits, about $15,000 a home in my costing) are repaid at 30% of income, so the money comes back and builds again.
4. In social-housing allocations and transfers, let a tenant ask to be near their people. It costs nothing and it is the one thing the current system never asks.
5. Fund an organiser at a human scale: one person for every hundred or so residents, chosen by them, who knows them and can act.
6. Use the published work. All of it is licensed for government and funded partners to use with credit (the licence), and I offer my services to design the pilot and the app (design services).

What is bought. Cheap existing property, so the money goes into homes rather than margins: a hostel, hotel or monastery that converts to owned rooms; a street of cheap houses bought as they come up; a half-empty town; or land with common mains where owners finish their own homes. Rough entry costs: a hostel or hotel $300,000–2 million; rural or town-edge houses $50,000–150,000 each. Buying existing apartments is much cheaper than building new ones.

What residents pay. A room or an apartment is sold at what it cost (with a modest margin where there is a purchase, about 20%), or paid off over time at original value plus inflation. Payments are about 30% of income. Swapping homes costs only the difference in value. People on low incomes own a room and pay it off instead of renting forever.

Where the money goes. Repayments go back into buying or building the next homes, so the fund perpetuates itself. Unpaid homes are resold. Growth pauses by itself when no newcomers arrive. A share of homes is held free as a float; this is what makes every move possible.

The failure clause, up front. If the community side stalls, what is left is ordinary property in an affordable area: it is sold and the money returned, or the funder keeps the homes. The downside is real estate; the upside is a model that repeats.

What I bring. $50,000 and more of my own savings and part of my future income; my labour, building on commission and organising for free; the working matching app at chooseneighbors.com; and thirty years of design, all published. I am looking for a loan or funding for the rest.

Where most of us live, everything around us is done by strangers from outside the area, who go home afterwards: the bins, the repairs, the shops, the council. There is nothing to do locally with the people you know, and no reason to step outside. The work app changes that.

• A resident switches to “available” on their phone and lists what they can do. Local jobs, casual work, the upkeep of the place, building the next homes, errands and projects appear, and the person takes what they want, when they want. No applications, no rosters.
• Friends can take jobs together. The organiser can suggest work to people and check that it is done well.
• Employers and the community post work to the same list. A local business that hires residents pays less rent in the place; one that hires outsiders pays more. The lease money runs the place.
• The point is not a job board. It is that there is something to do because the people around you are there, and that a person can earn without giving up their life to a schedule set by strangers.

It is cheap because the matching app already exists; this is a feature on it, not a new system. It can run in a pilot of twenty homes, and it can run in an existing social-housing street tomorrow.

• You tell the system who you want to live near: people, or a named group-area. It offers you a free room or apartment near them.
• Some homes are always kept free, so a group of friends can keep growing and anyone can move at any time, to other people or another area.
• A move is a name change on the papers, not a sale. If the new home is worth more, you pay only the difference.
• Upgrading: say you want an apartment instead of a room, and the system watches for one near your people.
• Block someone and the system moves you apart. If you share friends, your friends decide.
• Nothing happens without your yes. Moving is always a choice; anyone can stay where they are.

Every piece of this already exists somewhere: land trusts, cohousing, cost-rent co-ops, matching software (the fragments). The assembly is the new part, and the matching that used to make it impractical is now something software and AI can run.

Isolation

Half of Australians are lonely, isolated, or both, and the harm is on a par with smoking. A program that lifts people towards groups and services they travel to on a schedule helps, but it does not change what is around a person every day. The default life most people are left with is being alone, without community where they live. Homes near chosen people, and work because those people are around, change the default.

Housing as a commodity

Land and homes in Australia are treated as an asset that must never go down. The cheapest homes rose around 20% a year while a term deposit paid 5%. Property prices are left out of the inflation figures because a home is counted as an investment, not a cost of living. When a home is an investment, nobody on an ordinary income can move to be near their people, every move is taxed, and social housing allocates by wait list and scatters people among strangers for life. A loneliness program working inside a housing system built to inflate will keep refilling the same pool of lonely people. This plan takes land and homes out of that system: owned at cost, resold at cost plus inflation, moved by name change.

Representation at a human scale

There is one elected representative for tens of thousands of people; below that there is no one whose job it is to know a few hundred people and act on what they say, so people stop raising problems. One organiser for every 150 people at most, chosen by the residents and part of the place, is the answer in this plan.