Get $20K to Move to My Hometown

keep $20K to NOT move to my town now

My Appalachian hometown, Cumberland Maryland, is all over the media: Fox News, WUSA9, Fortune, the Washington Post, even Stephen Colbert. From Yahoo! Finance:

This U.S. Town Is Offering $20,000 To Relocate. Here's How To Secure $10,000 In Cash And $10,000 For Renovations

If you’re thinking about moving, Cumberland, Maryland, might just make it worth your while. This small town, located near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, offers a unique incentive to attract new residents.

Cumberland provides up to $20,000 to families who relocate within its city limits through a new program. Here's a simple breakdown of how to take advantage of this offer.

Employment-wise, you should have full-time remote work, local employment, proof of self-employment, or start a new job in the area. You'll also need to apply and get approved before relocating, and once approved, you have six months to make the move.

Lastly, you must purchase a home valued at least $150,000 in Cumberland. It must be your primary residence for at least five years, or you’ll have to pay back the money.

They’ve already received 1000 applications and, it turns out, have funding for 10. But with the median cost of a home at $112K, it might be the best nationwide ad campaign ever for $200K.

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in contrast

My hometown of the last 45 years published this guest editorial in the local paper:

Don’t blame UCSC students for housing crisis in Santa Cruz

I am a graduating student at UC Santa Cruz and throughout my time living here have been shocked at the sheer disgust some long-time Santa Cruz residents display when speaking about current students. To them, 

• I’m a “hungry machine just looking to consume” and 

• the source of the city’s housing, water and environmental woes. 

• I’m a separate class of Santa Cruz resident 

• not entitled to the same benefits as a long-time homeowner. 

• We’re the university’s responsibility, not the community’s.

However, I challenge those who view students as a burden 

• to recognize your culpability as a fellow human. Environmentally, 

• how does your consumption reduce the water supply? 

• How are you making it harder for people to live here by using up a precious unit of housing? 

• Why is it that students are the problem, not you?

Scapegoating only serves to absolve ourselves of the ability to reflect on our contribution to the world. I know that I am a part of the problem, just as you are, but it empowers me to be a part of the solution! Not to tear other people down for simply existing. 

Humans can live in harmony with one another and the environment, and that can happen so long as generations that came before us  extend the ladder of opportunity to thrive.

Continuing to view other students as if we aren’t real residents is dehumanizing. Why do I have less of a right to be here just because I wasn’t born 40 years ago? Where would the countless UCSC alumni living in Santa Cruz be today if they faced the exclusion we now face?

There are solutions to our problems, and it comes from understanding that collectively we must all change how we live if we want to safeguard our world for the next generation. Access to opportunity is dependent on growing to allow space for more neighbors. The university and city both have a shared responsibility to their constituents, which include students. Neither should be blaming the other, and all stakeholders should understand their role in positively contributing to change.

I am immensely grateful for the privilege of graduating from UCSC, and I refuse to gate-keep others from the same opportunity I had.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow is a graduating UCSC politics major, founder of the UCSC Student Housing Coalition, and served on the city of Santa Cruz’s Transportation and Public Works Commission as the youngest commissioner in Santa Cruz history.

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the hegemony of bankers

So Cumberland is selecting the most ambitious 1% of young, energetic applicants who want to put their money and labor into building up a home in the community. Santa Cruz, fast-tracked as a 15-minute city, is mandated to let developers build 4000 units of cubicle beehives with no parking to further crowd out families. Santa Cruz has the highest ratio of homeless to residents in California, which already has the highest ratio in the country.

Cumberland has one of the lowest costs of living in the country and lowest incomes; Santa Cruz has the absolute highest, as measured by the discrepancy between income and cost of housing. The median price of a home in Santa Cruz is now $1.4M. Few born in Santa Cruz will ever afford to live there; few born in Cumberland will find sustainable work there.

Viewed as systems, the problems of both cities are the same. Mortgages are competitively priced and create as much debt as the buyer can pay. The money backed by housing is created out of thin air and requires 30 years of dual incomes to buy back. The repayment is in money backed by labor, which is siphoned out to bank owners. They ‘invest’ this stored labor into more control and profits. Everyone with a roof over their heads works for the hegemony of bankers.

Meanwhile college migration takes hardworking, idealistic youth out of their communities and sends them to university towns where they drive up the cost of living. For those four years of ‘freedom,’ they’ll have debt that they’ll work 30 years to repay. Or their parents will pay for them to leave home, and only return because they’re broke.

The solution is also the same for both. If the community issued both the mortgages and the community credit to repay them, the cost of housing and money in circulation would always match. If the credit was distributed equally as targeted dividends to stimulate the local economy, our labor would serve families and neighborhoods. The universities would serve their communities rather than the other way around.

[thanks to Amy Rosebush for the image. I want to go to this school.]

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mullein & malin

In the video, I show a mullein plant in my backyard and explain why it’s a symbol for the new economy. Here is how they normally grow:

I had taken down a large overgrown vine, more than half dead, and it fell on a mullein plant where it crushed it for days before my gardeners could haul it away. I figured it was a goner but they grow like weeds, which in fact they are, in my garden. They’re long stalks, taller than I am, with one gangly Dr. Seuss flower and fuzzy, medicinal leaves.

Under the weight of the trellis and smothering vine, the stalk bent but didn’t break. Once freed, to my surprise, every bud along the stalk sprouted its own shoot that rocketed up, lined with hundreds of buds. This has become a thicket of 30 mulleinettes, each its own ecosystem with dozens of blossoms that fall like snow under the bumblebees who engulf it each morning, only to have new blossoms open the next day.

This is what our economies could be like, once we’re no longer smothered by the dead weight of banker debts. Each one could be a thriving ecosystem, interconnected but standing on its own, providing a hub for the productive buzz.

And after I posted the video, as I was flying to Cumberland last night, I admired the elegant tattoo on the nape of my neighbor’s neck. She said it was a Swedish symbol called a malin:

Its meaning is that, for every birth, there must be a little death. Every advance is preceded by adversity. It’s an infinity symbol broken by an arrow, so that instead of looping ad infinitum, it pushes it into a new dimension. It’s the most popular tattoo in the world, and I think I need one. Aren’t we all tired of going in circles?

That it’s called a malin and I was writing about mullein is a clear enough sign to me.

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For more episodes comparing Cumberland and Santa Cruz:

A home is the greatest expense of a family or individual, yet bankers own them with the click of a keystroke. Whether high or low, it will cost as much as the market can bear. In this episode, I compare the astronomical prices of California to my hometown of Cumberland, MD, where a car might cost more. Although the problems are opposite, the solution could be the same. I look at Michael Hudson and how the petrodollar is affecting real estate and 'institutional investors.' I wish for an economic coalition like the Italian healthcare cooperative IppocrateOrg, presented by Robert Malone. And I hope to put the FIRE economy of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate back in the hearth of community where it can empower our future.

What are the ends and means of The Great Reset? I define them as dispossession through economics and monopolies, depopulation through military and medical, and psychological manipulation through education and media. I look at what our purpose is as societies, communities and families, and how we can measure whether their agenda or our purpose is succeeding. I explain why our existing system is the worst of both worlds because banks create the money but leave government to care for the people. To reverse the flow of predatory capital, three co-existing economies are proposed: a subsistence economy for self-reliance, a trade economy for reciprocity, and a gift economy for creativity and pure joy.

With the consequences of the Great Reset becoming evident, but even those affected not wanting to see it, what's the most helpful thing we can do? I give the perspective of A Course in Miracles, having just finished the 670 pp manual once again. I look at The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow for an anthropology of anarchy. Vladimir Putin's June 17th address at St. Petersburg was an astute analysis of Europe and the US, with economic policies for Russia that support small business and home ownership. I apply his principles to the micro-communities we may need to start when economies in the West come crashing down, and show why it could be better than we'd dared to hope.

Buckminster Fuller said that to change things, you can’t fight the existing reality. You have to build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. This episode outlines ten universal principles of a new model, including the purpose of government, how to measure its success or failure, what community wealth really is, how to protect and proliferate it, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and paying your debt to society backwards and forwards. I begin by talking about the spiritual and metaphysical obstacles that keep us from imagining a new model and how to remove them in your own psyche. Based on my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I end with the three powers that communities require in order to control their own labor: debt, tax & cash.