I pay rent.
No property rights
I live in a good building that is owned by a non-profit dedicated to providing affordable housing. By that they mean the rent is low for Vancouver - maybe half or a third of what most people pay. The building is quiet and safe. All good.
I've been here over 20 years. I calculated that in that time I've paid over $150,000 in rent. I'm a renter. I get no property rights for all that money. The ownership of the building could change and I'd be out of here in a few months.
I'm not complaining. I know people who own houses and they face continual expense for maintenance to keep it on top of taxes. The difference between us is that she has property rights.
One of the underlying threads of my HUM class at UBC is that Vancouver occupies unceded territory claimed by several first nations.
Those people had occupied and lived off the land for thousands of years. I don't know much about what the life of those people was like. I've seen lots of evidence of their sophistication. First nations had territories, but I've not seen those territories spoken of as property.
Europeans came along who had the idea of property.
A king or queen in Europe could just claim vast territories as their own and then via a complicated legal process hand out deeds that gave property rights to favored people. The rights were basically made up out of thin air and first nations people were not among those favored.
Back in Europe most people weren't favored with property rights either.
When I was in school history was mostly a story of kings and popes and their struggles with each other. The life of ordinary people didn't get much attention. But even as a kid I learned about things like the enclosing of the commons and various peasant revolts. In those narratives ordinary people were seen as the source of trouble but it was clear that their lives were not good. It was common in Europe for poor people to pay rich people for the very right to exist.
They paid rent,
From what I know this territory (Vancouver) is a region that was very rich in natural resources. Food was plentiful. But there was no need for people to take more than they could personally use so the first nations people could live in the same ecological balance with their territory as the fish and the ravens.
They didn't pay rent.
By the time Europeans got here they had evolved to be a capitalist culture that looked for resources to exploit to make money.
Their eyes lit up - they could make a LOT of money by exploiting the resources here. But the capitalist way cannot be in ecological balance with a territory.
That ecological imbalance produces cities like Vancouver as the ecosystem moves to a new balance. The economic activity of capitalism enables concentrations of people who transform their ecosystem from one full of trees to one full of concrete and steel. Before Europeans came this region (Metro Vancouver) supported 20 or 30 thousand people (IIRC) and now there are that many people within a few blocks of me. We have to be stacked in buildings or we'd run out of space.
Recently I saw a short film about animated boulders who existed in a geologic time scale.
Living things for them were ephemeral. The film showed trees popping up and disappearing. A city appears as a huge growth on the land that just springs out of nothing because people move to fast to be visible at that scale.
Indigenous people lived closer to that geologic time scale.
From my perspective their culture was stable. Stable enough that it didn't change much in thousands of years. By comparison, capitalist culture is like an explosion. Underlying the physical structure of the city I can see and feel is a social and economic structure that is exploding too.
Which brings me back to rent. My little space is quite a bit larger and much more comfortable and secure. It's valuable to me and is worth spending a third of my income on. I'm lucky. These days I can comfortably afford that on my pension. What if I didn't have a pension? Along Hastings St nearby people are camping on the sidewalk in tents.
My pension functions for me like a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
For many reasons I think a UBI is a good idea.
I understand that if the UBI would be a huge change in our economic ecosystem if it was available to everyone. All sorts of things would shift that would become visible in the physical structure of our lived landscape.
What do you think? I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.