0:00

sorry about that um yes hi everybody my name is tao faye and i’m the program

0:06

producer at 221a um in light of the news that emerged

0:12

this past month of the mass graves of 215 children found on the former grounds

0:17

of the kamloops residential school in sequopic territory and as news of more grim discoveries

0:23

continue to emerge across this country we continue to sit with the great grief

0:29

and harrowing truth of this moment even though these horrors have of course been long spoken about by indigenous

0:35

communities and residential school survivors for those of you joining from outside of

0:41

canada we’ll include a list of media links to contextualize these recent developments

0:48

221a being located on the unseated and uns unsurrendered territories of the

0:53

musculum squamish and saiwatu first nations close neighbors to support

0:59

traditional territories we cannot look away from the brutality upon which our presence as settler-led

1:06

as a settler-led organization is predicated that every time we speak about land

1:12

in the context of so-called canada as we’ll be doing so today um we are also always speaking of lands

1:18

that carry the trace of indigenous death and erasure that the twin workings

1:24

of cultural genocide and land theft under the settler colonial state of

1:30

canada cannot be decoupled as the truth and reconciliation commission report makes very clear

1:37

quote the canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to digest divest

1:44

itself from its legal and financial obligations to aboriginal people and gain control over their land and

1:50

resources unquote a process that continues of course today

1:56

um so you’ll see in this slide um here a list of links where you can support the sequoia nation and other

2:03

indigenous groups through this harrowing time at the same time that they’re protecting

2:10

their territories from continuing colonization and resource extraction for example at the ferry creek blockade

2:17

where land defenders are currently resisting uh the industrial logging old growth forests

2:25

the photo in this slide on the left side is of an artwork by the artist wes harmon which hangs in front of the

2:33

vancouver art gallery entitled the lowest bar it expresses how land acknowledgements are really the

2:39

lowest bar in the urgent process of reconciliation and restitution in this country

2:45

in front of it on the steps of the gallery are 215 tiny shoes memorializing the children lost

2:53

thank you i’ll pass it back to jesse now thank you tao for your

3:00

territorial acknowledgement and um sharing where we’re at in canada with a heavy heart and a wounded psyche um as we re

3:08

re-engage our relations um with indigenous nations to deal with this reality um my name is justin mckee and

3:15

i’m the head of strategy at 221a i lead the organization’s research programming communications and advancement

3:24

um and we’re gathered today for a program that’s part of the launch of 22na’s digital strategy titled

3:29

blockchains and cultural padlocks we’ve just completed our research phase of the initiative and have published a research report of our findings values

3:36

and recommendations we convened a research cluster to investigate the potential of block

3:41

change as an institutional technology and through this collective work a freely available 200-page pdf was

3:47

produced that includes research papers that survey our culture’s ability to enable a mass collaborative financial turn

3:53

developed with new models of digital cooperativism the emergent strategy is to enable the conditions for

3:59

recommending land data and objects through the development of responsive and resilient asset sharing power distributing and

4:06

value generating networks we are supported by the canada council for the arts digital strategy fund which

4:11

awarded a multi-year grant 221a in the organizational transformation stream of

4:16

its awards this funding from which awarded grants from 2018 to 21 supported strategic

4:22

initiatives that will help artists groups and organizations better understand the digital world engage with it and respond to the

4:28

cultural and social changes it’s producing um just briefly for those of you who

4:33

might be joining us for the first time here at 221a just to give you a sense of

4:39

what we are as an organization we were founded or initiated as a student club

4:44

at emily carr university which was motivated by the tension between um art and design and all of the

4:50

differences and kind of challenges that each discipline would put towards each other and then in 2007 we

4:55

were founded as a non-profit um society here in british columbia um

5:00

and that started at a at a collectively run space in vancouver’s china town east georgia

5:05

street 221 east georgia where um the original members of 221a shared studio space in the back

5:11

and a small kind of gallery was made up front since that time we’ve grown into um a larger network of cultural use

5:19

properties across the city and we now operate five cultural use properties for a total of over 50

5:25

000 square feet of cultural use space which is shared with artists and other non-profits and other forms of

5:31

makers and designers and all of that space is below market and on a cost recovery

5:37

model so we do have a collaborative model that we work with with a larger community to kind of um exist as 21a

5:44

we also work with public art and produce that and we also have a research program that supports fellowships and

5:50

projects like our blockchains and cultural paths initiative our mission is to work with artists and designers to research and develop social

5:57

cultural ecological infrastructure and our vision is for all people and to have the means to make an access culture

6:04

you can find our report the blockchains and cultural padlocks digital strategy research report on our website 2218.ca

6:10

um which is free to download just one sec okay so today i’m joined by

6:17

one of two q a current research fellows and a partner on our digital strategy which is the non-profit organization doma represented today by maxine rookman

6:25

echo um who’s calling in from kiev ukraine as well as the blockchains and cultural

6:30

padlocks researcher morales who’s a critical geographer based in victoria british columbia

6:36

morale authored a research paper in our report entitled encrypting enclosure fractionalized real estate on the

6:41

blockchain as respondents today we’ve invited andy anne who’s director of simon fraser

6:47

university’s city program here in vancouver and he’s provided crucial research and analysis over the

6:52

past decade in vancouver’s intensifying housing crisis as well we have ian spangler who is a phd candidate in geography from the

6:59

university of kentucky in lexington who’s been studying um platform real estate with a critical lens please

7:05

allow me a moment just to introduce each of our speakers more formally since uh their backgrounds and their own research are so varied i think it’s important to

7:12

know what’s informing the ideas that you’ll each can be contributing to our conversation today

7:18

next team rock matako is an architect designer and entrepreneur his research and design work explores

7:23

new forms of urban living enabled by emerging technologies he’s the founder of the architectural practice the center for spatial

7:29

technologies also in kiev and the project lead at doma

7:35

which is shared between paris and kiev and it’s a proposed housing platform for the cooperative token economy

7:41

morale sudhahenya is a phd candidate in the university of victoria’s department of geography her research investigates the cultural

7:48

politics and commodification of digital urban spaces shaped by global policies peer-to-peer systems and smart

7:54

technologies equally influencing her scholarship are contemporary approaches to critical data studies

8:00

feminist political economy and new materialist scholars that foreground questions surrounding access citizenship embodiment financial

8:07

exclusion social justice and subjectivities in relation to multi-scalar decision-making

8:13

processes her doctoral research project supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada

8:19

traces and ethnography of contemporary life under distributed but rambunctious instances of capitalism

8:25

generated by blockchains and cryptocurrency markets iam spangler is a geographer writer and cartographer

8:32

based in lexington and spangler’s currently a phd candidate at the university of kentucky and his dissertation work explores the

8:38

spatialization of digital real estate platforms he’s asking the questions how do new technologies for the management

8:44

transaction surveillance and surveillance of real estate transform how we come to own the earth

8:49

and perhaps importantly who gets to own it and deanne is director of simon fraser

8:54

university’s city program he’s extensively worked in the nonprofit and private urban planning sectors he specializes in the field of urban

9:01

regeneration applied demographics geographic information systems neighborhood development public outreach social media and

9:08

quantitative research he’s a registered professional planner with the canadian institute of planners and a certified geographic information

9:14

systems professional he’s been a visiting scholar at new york university’s asian pacific american studies institute

9:20

as well as a visiting scholar at simon ford’s university’s institute of governance he served on the board of directors for

9:26

the downtown eastside neighborhood house and he’s held a chair with the david suzuki foundation’s climate council in

9:31

the city of vancouver’s planning commission so the topic of our conversation today

9:37

recommending territory diversifying housing tenure with platform cooperatives we’re going to address um a platform’s

9:43

potential to inspire cooperative housing models at civic scale so this means people getting together to

9:49

achieve a common goal and sharing the value that’s collectively generated doma is a project that envisions a smart

9:55

commons where people can pool their resources to raise their collective power while lowering the cost and barriers to

10:00

membership for the services and products associated with home developed in anticipation of blockchain technology’s

10:06

broader adoption doma offers a flexible secure and transport transparent model for the many

10:12

to have a stake in their city throughout doma’s time working with 22a as a fellow since the beginning of this

10:17

year they’ve been developing a closer study of the lower mainland’s housing market and partnership with the center for spatial technologies

10:23

also in kiev i just want to give a shout out to a few people who’ve collaborated on the work that maxine will give us a preview of today

10:29

and they include charles pan who’s an m.a candidate in community and regional planning at the university of british columbia

10:35

who work with 221a as a sustainability scholar this academic year as well as francis seng a systems

10:40

developer and researcher based in new york as well as alessia covalenco german

10:48

from the center for spatial technologies thank you all for your research curiosity and ongoing work with this project

10:53

together they are creating a digital dashboard with a rich array of interrelated data sets related to housing over the past decade

10:59

and in these territories known as vancouver and they’re modeling an affordability index calculator which is helping us

11:06

develop a platform narrative for doma as a as an example of how it could exist here

11:11

this research provides insights towards the methods we could collectively leverage to shift the housing 10-year model of the city

11:18

and diversify sent a centuries-long monoculture of oversqueezed mentorship and indebted home ownership to set the

11:25

stage for our speakers today i want to give you a bit of insight into our strategy i’ll read a brief excerpt from my editorial ssa in our report

11:31

as well as look at some key terms we’re working with in our strategy the section of the essay i’m going to read from is sub-headed blockchain in

11:38

the back business in the front so since the crypto winter of 2018

11:45

and following the collapse of over-inflated cryptocurrency markets and exchanges blockchain as a technology has become

11:51

somewhat of a cheap trick cited by companies and organizations purporting that their products and services

11:57

would be advanced by blockchain without much evidence in their back end to support the lofty proclamations some sage advice was

12:03

offered to our project team and made the 2019 blockchain at ubc annual conference here in vancouver

12:09

put your business model up front and develop the blockchain technology to support it in the back in other words don’t lead with the

12:14

technology blockchain itself is an ideology not a business model um sorry it’s not an ideology and it’s

12:21

not a business model it can be used in many ways it could be used by a new liberal ideology by

12:26

emergent ideologies that are more socially and ecologically aligned and by those who lead conversations that confuse decentralization with

12:32

libertarian politics so cultural as strategy offers is an

12:38

opportunity for tutuan and our collaborators to take stock of an emerging digitally native economy while advancing the organization’s

12:45

mission of creating new forms of cultural social and ecological infrastructure in our research we came across two

12:51

standout wide scope models for development opportunities that prioritize more cohesive and aligned social futures in their public

12:57

facing iterations as they exist today while working on blockchain in the back end though these initiatives find their

13:04

roots well before blockchain’s arrival in 2008 the scope and reach of their efforts achieves power gained through network

13:10

effects it has become clear in researching these models that broader the broader the network the more sense blockchain makes as an

13:17

enabling technology the first example i’ll cite is the platform cooperative consortium

13:23

which roots itself in um the 1886 rochdale principles um sorry i just lost

13:29

my screen there that have formed the basis uh on which cooperatives around the world continue to operate today

13:35

trevor schultz uh of the new schools institute for the cooperative digital economy founded the consortium which

13:41

includes partners across the americas asia and europe through their work they’ve been able to provide essential

13:47

development advice and support for worker-led digital cooperatives that assemble and aggregate their value locally such as nanny services and ride

13:54

shares enabling more competitive services greater compensation and more reliable job security to

14:00

workers this gives such small organizations collective competitive power in relation to the mainstream

14:05

platforms that have become icons of the ill-fated first generation sharing economy such as uber and airbnb

14:11

which are underpinned by exploitive and extractive corporate principles only in the past few years has the

14:17

platform consortium begun developing quietly with blockchain enabling this new wave

14:23

of cooperatives and social enterprise to be enhanced with the power of a decentralized internet of value

14:28

the second example that i’ll cite is the black socialists of america and their dual power map which is

14:34

inspired by the leninist principle that workers should hold dual power in a society a concept that led to

14:39

the october revolution um in the 21st century dual power or counter power

14:44

um it’s been used to refer to non-violent strategies of achieving a socialist economy

14:49

by means of incrementally establishing and then networking institutions of direct participatory democracy to contest the

14:56

existing power structures of the capitalist state the american art critic yates mckee no

15:01

known relation to me describes a dual power approach as quote forging alliances and supporting demands

15:08

on existing institutions elected officials public agencies universities workplaces banks corporations museums

15:16

while at the same time developing self-organized counter institutions end quote so the black socialists of

15:22

america’s dual power map has become their core strategy and it began by crowdsourcing and aggregating

15:28

worker-owned businesses across the u.s they found that large corporate enterprises which uh for them were

15:35

firms that had over 500 employees made up roughly 51 of the overall employment in the u.s

15:40

of course this data is pretty pandemic whereas the remainder was shared by medium small and very small enterprises

15:48

so this was an optimistic finding this show that the political potential of uniting such businesses and their workers to harness the economic and

15:55

political power held within these networks could be possible and seeing the massive kind of effects that

16:01

have happened to the employment scenario in the us after the pandemic this is just more

16:06

room for these kind of strategies to take root so the black socialists of america

16:11

have signaled that they’re working with blockchain developers to find ways to incorporate the technology into their ongoing work

16:17

and giving the nature of the way and given the nature of the way the dual power map has been assembled

16:22

it seems likely that they’ll be able to implement a pertinent use case for things such as smart contracts manage and share asset control and distribution through

16:29

responsive and urgent means but the black socialists of america are not yet revealing their findings or providing much public insight into this

16:36

development comes as no surprise so the disruptive nature of this work uh towards the united states corporate

16:42

economy is not only a trade secret but also a means for workers to take the controls back after generations of aggressive

16:47

anti-labor action by disabling unions and diminishing employment legislation brought about from the liberal globalist

16:53

politics of the past 30 so years combine this with the legacy of how the u.s responds to black-led

16:59

self-organization through regimented domestic terrorism enacted by state security forces against its own citizens

17:05

by conducting surveillance psychological operations character attacks community intimidation bodily violence

17:11

and openly targeted assassinations it’s clear that the bsa has plenty of reasons to keep his blockchain

17:16

developments buried deep until the most socially contagious use case for their network is found and made in a scalable tech morale

17:24

sudahanya who’s joining us today a feminist geographer and phd candidate at the university of victoria looks into

17:29

some of the early promises being made too quickly by finance driven startups with which so with with socialized ideas in mind

17:37

and selling points pointing out that these ideals are not evident within their design and outcome

17:42

in our paper encrypting enclosure fractionalized real estate on the blockchain which 228 commissioned as part of this

17:49

initiative it becomes clear that without cultural and social networks to feedback in the design of such platforms

17:55

they turn out to be lizard brained and their smokescreen ambivalence reveals major pitfalls that could further

18:01

damn oppressed communities seeking equity and justice today uh sodahania further raises questions um

18:08

that that also brought that were also brought forth more broadly by the gamestop meme stock scenario of

18:14

early year this year which is about the rights and access publics are afforded as investors

18:20

versus the more traditional accredited investor route with high barriers to entropy her writing offers an exemplar of what

18:26

cultural work has to offer to the world a space for review critical engagement and holistic advancement of

18:32

the tech sector’s lofty but often shallow ideals and notions about its own ability to improve our common conditions

18:38

so one startup that does seem to be offering a critical lens and perhaps anti-capitalist count cultural

18:44

positioning um is doma um the nonprofit which is developing a platform

18:50

cooperative for housing um in 2019 doma traveled to vancouver to join us as we work with the

18:55

university of british columbia and emily carr to host a series of events and workshops and public presentations around

19:01

the platform um dome as proposed users are open holders like shareholders who

19:06

increase their stake in housing co-op as they start paying monthly dues for access to a network of properties rather than buying

19:12

or renting a single unit this allows for the occupant to remain in place and accrue equity over time

19:18

while decreasing monthly payments and it would allow for movement between network owned units to adapt to the scale

19:23

of household changes over time offering flexibility with stability with such a well-honed use case and

19:29

critical approach to the development space 228 continued to work with dolma as a fellow throughout 2020 and 21

19:35

to more closely study model and assess how their platform might be used to counteract the deteriorate housing crisis in the

19:42

lower mainland of british columbia which has been brought on by speculative finance tools

19:48

of the past couple decades today maxine will give us a preview of some work of work in progress on this front but by no

19:54

means is this a finished project yet and we’ll have another event later in the year to kind of look at um what they’ve been working on with us

20:01

uh more fully um this so the strategic dismantling of kind of late stage capitalism and the

20:07

rebuilding of kind of socialist ideals within western economies and politics is is going to be enabled by a growing

20:13

constituency of millennials and gen z’s however this is not a socialized movement that is

20:19

ideologically or patriotically led the artist joshua cinderella who surveys and analyzes emergent political theory

20:25

and culture and online communities refers to this wave of socialism as more akin to the common-sense realization

20:32

that bulk buying plans result in the best possible agency to provide increased quality of life for the many

20:39

considering the still accelerating tech lash that happened post 2016 as the egregious abuses of information

20:45

and content management by social media companies such as facebook and twitter and consolidated data that powerhouses

20:51

like google have become now common public knowledge forging a social environment to develop

20:56

alternative futures should become a priority of the cultural realm we have a ready and willing audience and population eager to explore alternatives

21:03

to the dire and downwardly mobile future we’re still hurdling toward um in the past couple of years two books

21:09

on this topic have breached bestsellers lists that have influenced some even in older generations to consider these ideas

21:16

um more deeply and think about radical design changes to their practices

21:22

um and this this shows us the potential to align the digital realm to meet the social and political ideals of our

21:28

societies today and we can collectively work to improve social economic and political literacy

21:34

towards these ends um jenny odell an artist and professor at stanford

21:39

um she wrote how to do nothing resisting attention economy and it was a meandering intuitive and effective series of personal essays

21:45

about her artistic practice and intellectual preoccupations which can be summarized with her idea that capitalism colonialist thinking

21:53

loneliness and an abusive stance towards the environment all co-produce one another this tangled mess is something that

21:58

won’t be solved through technology alone but rather through shifting perspectives and re-articulating the interdependencies

22:04

we’ve been ignoring those interdependencies that exist between one another our histories and the bioregions we inhabit

22:10

are too externalized as they are today and they create a sense of station and

22:16

atomization we are rarely adequately able to account our cultural work in thinking

22:22

um another book on on this topic would be shashina zubov’s work and um

22:29

the age of surveillance capitalism the fight for human future at the new frontier of power has become an urgently

22:35

needed canonical text that will hopefully inspire the drafting and design of a new type of digital realm around striving to become

22:41

uncoupled from the controlling and intrusive surveillance practices of the major tech platforms as they exist

22:46

today as zuboff notes in an interview related to the release of her book surveillance capitalism was enabled by

22:52

the u.s state now it’s to reach such a powerful and pervasive phase that it’s undermining

22:57

the democracy that bore it and offering alternatives she proposes that it’s impossible to imagine

23:02

surveillance capitalism without the digital but it’s easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism so this

23:08

calls us again in the cultural field to work to imagine spaces within the digital where we can design new forms of

23:15

participation that’ll be leveraged on self-sovereign identities rather than spilling our personal data into every platform we encounter without

23:21

consent this is both an idea and a movement that leverages the notion that individuals should have agency over their digital

23:27

identities and the data they produce the notion of the self-sovereign digital identity

23:32

is core to blockchain’s potential to build a new internet that’s leveraged on a transparent management of individual and collective data and

23:39

assets through the use of smart contracts which adhere to our chosen principles of engagement and exchange

23:45

i’ll end the reading of my essay here the full essays available in the report on our site tutuna.ca um

23:52

just allow me to share my screen again before i sign off i’m just going to share a couple key terms with everybody

23:58

and i did have some visuals for you great can everybody see that now is that

24:04

okay

24:09

great um great um so just to start this is a

24:16

slide from the um from uh the essay squad wealth by the under other internet group highly

24:22

recommended um but it kind of breaks down um you know what we’re looking for in terms

24:28

of of of this new digital realm in terms of creating new institutions um creating a sense of future togetherness

24:34

and ultimately what this means to to collectivize power is creating squad wealth

24:42

um and you know essential kind of tagline of our strategy is to um enable a kind of a digital commons and a

24:49

digitally cooperative future so just looking at these terms i’m going to kind of cite the commons according uh

24:54

to dimiji on a fua a designer who one of our board members laura kozak introduced

25:00

us to we’re very grateful for this um and uh de meiji says a commons is a resource

25:06

that is shared by a group of people historically a commons has been a physical resource for example a land

25:11

resource but its definition has now expanded to non-physical human-made resources such as peer-to-peer information networks

25:18

the physical commons therefore relate to physical resources and their use um

25:25

sorry you’re seeing my scripts instead of the slides one secure

25:40

oopsie is that better

25:49

that looks good sorry about that i’ll just give you a view back into um

25:57

sorry two screens here [Music]

26:02

i don’t think you saw this one the squad well slide um which is pretty important so yeah i would totally recommend this

26:07

essay just it’s on the other internet’s website otherinternet.net um very easy to find yep

26:14

and then back to the commons um so sorry the comments is a resource that’s shared by a group of people historically a

26:21

commons has been a physical resource for example a land resource but its definition is now expanded to a non-physical human-made resource

26:33

the digital commons relates to aspects of the non-market networked information economy that are controlled and negotiated by social

26:40

exchanges and agreements networks here represent systems of human interaction emphasize

26:46

um the humanness of our structural patterns physical commons may also be further

26:52

categorized into open commons like oceans air highway systems and limited access commons like pasture

26:58

agreements for farmers or regulated like forests that have restrictions and use placed on them which has become a growing issue of

27:05

concern here in british columbia in the past couple of weeks around the the encampment protesting logging at ferry

27:11

creek and there’s also the unregulated comments which does exist like grazing pastures for farmers with no

27:17

use restrictions um totally recommend checking out um his

27:23

his work on his website on recommending just on afua.com recommending if you

27:28

want to see more of his um seven principles which are illustrated um here

27:35

great and um so we’re going to talk about land next and this is a definition according to the united nation

27:40

conventions to combat desert desertification and the image that we’re seeing

27:46

comes from a diagram from the study uh which is called property rights and property wrongs

27:51

micro treaties with the earth which was authored by dark matter labs the mcconnell foundation and civic

27:56

indigenous it’s available on dark matter labs medium page and it’s showing us the um the the

28:02

different kind of interface layers that that we kind of have to negotiate or we’re forced to negotiate kind of in a

28:09

neoliberal economy around access and use of land um which brings us through private property title

28:14

municipal laws provincial laws federal laws constitutional law and then the foundational law which is indigenous law

28:21

and kind of um protocol for the land um so the united nations is saying that land is a terrestrial bioproductive

28:27

system that comprises soil vegetation and other bio biota and the ecological and hydrological

28:33

processes that operate within that system our perceptions of land are not only a

28:38

response to the outside world but also a cause and effect of cultural filtering by which certain phenomena

28:44

feature prominently while others recede into the background in other words the less visible the

28:49

elements of land are able to sorry in other words the less visible the elements of land there are to a particular

28:56

stakeholder the less meaning they have for that person and perhaps result in a lack of awareness as to their possible critical

29:02

function the meaning and value of land can change as we become wealthier or do not directly depend on the land for our

29:08

immediate survival furthermore land is often infused with a feeling of sovereignty and jurisdiction

29:14

aligned with different patterns of ownership and use rights which in turn governs our economic and socio-political

29:20

interactions and conflicts with others all these factors influence attitudes towards land use and the way that land

29:26

is managed nevertheless keeping land in a healthy state is an essential contribution to

29:31

human security access to food and water the stability of employment and livelihoods

29:36

resilience to climate change and extreme weather events and ultimately social and political security

29:42

recognizing the perspectives of diverse stakeholders and ensuring their participation in decision making is a critical first step towards better

29:49

land management and planning land is owned and managed by governments corporations communities

29:54

individuals but we all depend on the land for our health and for our well-being

30:03

and then finally to talk about data we’re gonna i’ve taken a quote from ishan wu who’s the deputy director of

30:10

the in the scientific and technological information of china so he says that data are artifacts that reflect the

30:16

phenomenon in the natural or social world in the form of figures facts plots information is anything

30:22

communicated among living things it is one of the three mainstays supporting the survival and evolution of

30:28

life along with the energy and along with energy and materials finally knowledge is a human construct

30:34

which categorizes things records significant events and finds causal relationships amongst things

30:40

and our events in a systemic way thank you um i’ll end it there and

30:47

i’ll pass it over to maxime to give us a presentation from our first panelist today

30:56

oh maxine you’re still um there um can you hear me now

31:03

um jesse thank you very much for this introduction and generally for all the time of

31:09

collaborating really that’s um what i will show you now is

31:15

mostly stuff that we’ve developed together through this course of this fellowship i will though

31:23

first start from introducing the team i’m working with and it’s called the center for special technologies we are

31:29

based in kiev we always do these kinds of systematic projects when you know it’s

31:36

not like we are architects but we don’t work with these kinds of one client one project uh things we

31:42

often try to seek for kind of dealing with more infrastructural things we are on instagram at spatialtech.info

31:50

in general you can find us in most social media and um this is how also jesse found us

31:56

and it all started from this project um we did actually with dark matter labs

32:02

who were just mentioned but just a second ago and the project he revolves around this phenomenon of

32:10

highline in new york uh so what we did with the dark matter labs is

32:15

also part of the project that they’ve initiated um which is actually called smart commons

32:21

was basically trying to figure out uh this kind of disjunction between uh public investment that went

32:28

into highline and property value uplift that was then privatized so

32:35

uh the work was very basic in terms of everything we used was openly available

32:42

data and we also relied on uh writings of certain geographers and economists

32:50

who whose kind of studies we almost directly visualized but then even that visualization

32:56

happened to be quite powerful as we discovered um uh we basically managed to show that

33:03

this kind of development of this area in in manhattan which

33:08

happened to be around highline uh costed in general uh 187 million and uh you know

33:16

it basically resulted in 3.4 billion of um kind of value uplift

33:23

then the absolute majority of which was then privatized obviously

33:28

and this kind of brings about a larger issue with specifically you can read

33:35

more about in the medium post by dml where you know it becomes a question of

33:42

how we actually then democratize this kind of value that you know the city gains from every new

33:49

development the city gains from you know diversity from people making their

33:55

their neighborhoods exciting and um most often those things are privatized here you can see this

34:00

uh kilometer bands uh from uh from highline and actually like the

34:05

difference um in terms of value uplift uh uh through

34:11

almost 10 years of existence of timeline is pretty obvious and you can also see the

34:17

correlation here which is like every dot represents uh property and the curve is is representing the

34:25

kind of amount of value uplift uh kind of depending on distance from

34:31

highline um yeah so this was done uh almost more than a year ago and this

34:39

happened to be the way we started to work with 221a but the project that i will share with

34:47

you today and generally the project that 221a supports within the fellowship is called doma and it’s a project that

34:55

kind of started from this very basic frustration about housing crisis and you know like

35:03

i’m an architect by training and very used to think about uh housing crisis we were many times

35:09

asked to develop housing solutions for contexts where people cannot afford homes and all the trickery that

35:17

you can imagine about smart house plannings and you know like

35:22

smaller apartments and kitchens and stuff like that obviously it does not help on

35:27

infrastructural levels so you know what actually happened on the infrastructure

35:32

level is this comment that one mit student

35:38

published after thomas piquette’s book came out which is basically that the backbone of the fact that capital is

35:45

growing faster than incomes is housing but actually housing kind of encompasses

35:51

most of that um growth and you know we i mean an easy thing about working on

35:58

this on such a project is that everyone understands the pain right like uh i mean

36:03

i guess like most of people we where we come they they’ve been at least in some phase of their life very well

36:11

familiar with these issues and then we basically tell them about domo which is a project which

36:16

um in its core there is this idea that we could finally figure out some sort of

36:24

urban software as we call it one that simply connects existing residential

36:29

units existing apartments and houses with community of users in a different way

36:36

and of course for us blockchain was really important in terms of coming up with

36:41

this project thinking voters that were there before

36:47

for i mean i also like as an architect i studied a lot about groupon and other forms of collective housing cooperative community

36:54

land trust but a very basic idea that kind of constitutes the core of doma is that the

37:01

property can be tokenized so we can all kind of co-invest in one apartment currently

37:08

uh where i’m speaking from it’s legally impossible to even own an apartment with a unrelated person

37:15

like if we to two of us um if say one one of me cannot afford the home

37:20

and with friends we would be able to um kind of invest and purchase

37:27

collective home that’s not fully uh legally possible which is again like um one simple

37:35

barrier and then the more tricky idea that uh doma proposes is this idea of equity

37:42

generation so the the reason for this is such that um where dolma was

37:49

originally conceived for which are ukrainian cities uh rents are extremely high comparing to

37:56

property prices you will not believe it but the apartments here can be purchased for less than

38:03

i don’t know like 60 000 u.s dollars but at the same time rents are

38:08

comparable to most of european cities and even some of the north american cities

38:14

which makes um the period that you would buy a home with rent you pay very low

38:19

so price to rent ratio in years of rent paid um that you would

38:26

be able to buy the house you’re renting is around 12 to 14 years which is really really low

38:32

comparing to places like vancouver so the idea was that since um we now can generate this interesting

38:40

way of of kind of pulling money together co-investing

38:45

hashtag squad wealth into into into properties we then could also think about ways to

38:52

redistribute the value of um of that investment and specifically the appreciation

39:00

of the asset with future tenants so the the idea was that if i’m renting

39:07

a house that i could have purchased for 12 years of rent wouldn’t it be fair if

39:12

at least after those 12 years i would generate certain amount of equity in that house

39:18

so we have been calibrating this scheme and been thinking about how to do this best in ukrainian context

39:25

but meanwhile we were also traveling a lot and coming to different places across mostly europe

39:31

but also happened to be vancouver and what that brought to us is an understanding how different and how

39:39

complex situations with housing crisis are in different cities so housing crisis in kiev is even

39:46

radically different from one in moscow and he’s he’s as different from

39:52

european western european cities uh i mean specifically we somehow

39:58

focus on world cities still because these are cities that are close to

40:03

our team’s uh kind of um knowledge and so so based on this

40:09

diversity of cities and diversity so here like these are organized by price to rent ratio

40:15

but then also mortgage as a percentage of income in ukraine almost non purchases of

40:22

housing include mortgage which again i can imagine it’s hard for you to

40:27

to believe only two percent of people prefer to to use some sort of financial leverage

40:34

um while and simply this happens because mortgage is extremely expensive

40:40

uh and you know the third parameter that we look here is a price to income ratio which also has a

40:46

lot to do with how people can afford homes but you know obviously there are many more parameters that you can look at

40:52

and see how the nuance of housing crisis

40:57

kind of manifests itself in different places across the globe so first attempts to do something

41:04

with that kind of understanding was this game that we developed for a range of art shows that were cancelled because of

41:11

covet but i mean we started to develop this

41:16

kind of artificial city which always kind of repeats an existing city

41:22

but we conceal which city it is we take all the data including average rents average home values

41:29

generally like normal incomes for people population stuff like that also dynamic of how nuke housing is

41:35

being constructed and stuff like that so we basically developed this uh

41:41

also with francis tang who’s from jesse already introduced as one of the contributors to

41:47

the project we developed this little game where you can actually access it by going to play.doma.city and

41:55

you know like try to go through this uh challenge of trying to find a house in a city and

42:01

then maybe discovering some sort of colleagues with whom you would try to

42:07

gain uh the stake in the city back uh and you know the vancouver project

42:13

and collaboration with 221a seems to make perfect sense in terms of

42:18

this trajectory that i just described so this is already a map of vancouver

42:24

and some data crunching attempts that we had in the very beginning of

42:30

this process when we were looking at this weird spike and property prices that happened in 2018

42:36

very curious to see that case study comparing to some of the other places where we see the slow and steady growth and

42:44

uh push um for people who can less and less afford homes

42:50

but here there is this kind of paranormal event and we try to study them

42:55

in as uh kind of close uh way as possible also uh with the help of jessie

43:02

we conducted mostly mostly jesse with with a range of interviews where

43:12

they basically try to figure out an opinion about this of many experts and there we have one of

43:19

them joining this course presentation i’m very looking much looking forward to see in the yang so

43:26

um yeah i mean as we heard from many of these presentations uh saturation vancouver is

43:33

quite particular and basically uh this what i’m showing you now is our you

43:39

know we are people who are very far from from uh from the place is an attempt

43:45

to data crunch those things and see what’s going on in vancouver actually

43:50

and um and basically we’ve developed this way to analyze property prices look at trends

43:57

try to describe some data try to generate some uh some information that we don’t have

44:03

trying to understand how income’s changed and stuff like that so uh the final uh product that

44:10

as jesse announced we will share but by the end of our fellowship will be very much based on

44:16

something like this which is an online interactive map where you can click around things and learn about the

44:24

situation in vancouver but as we showed in that case with new

44:29

york we are looking for this particularly simple but telling examples

44:37

and i i’ll propose two very again very simple things to you very curious uh maybe if there will be

44:44

opinions about them over the discussion and generally you know because the project is uh on

44:49

the way we would be very happy to hear any sort of feedback about this so um one thing that

44:56

we are discussing with the team is the relationship of median household income and rents and of

45:02

course there is this uh i don’t even know who came up with the fact that it needs to be 30

45:08

in an ideal world i guess that’s kind of the generational standard that some of the

45:13

parents often tell to their kids but the idea that um you know like the the ratio of um that

45:21

we spend on rent the ratio of our income that we spend on rent is growing and it

45:26

actually does it doesn’t look so bad in vancouver as it does in some of the european cities that we studied

45:33

but a very simple thing to see is you know given a certain income and certain

45:39

social position you’d be able to own that kind of dashboard see what parts of city you can

45:44

afford and how does city welcome you or not with that

45:49

kind of social situation the other much more concerning for vancouver

45:55

situation is the situation with housing prices and that situation has to do with the

46:00

fact that simply uh similarly to this 30 rule we found this legend that um the bank

46:08

will give you a mortgage which constitutes around 4 to 4.5

46:15

times your median yearly income which in case of vancouver looks super

46:21

scary because these curves not even intersect in 2005 and generally speaking uh only from what

46:28

we looked only 2.5 percentile of incomes in terms of

46:34

top 2.5 of incomes can think about affording average home

46:40

which is honestly quite crazy so what we are thinking about is to make some of things like this

46:47

available for you to play around on the map seeing both the map and these charts

46:52

trying to see how things change through the time uh this is something that we’re

46:58

currently working on and we are also having a lot of issues with data and there are some things that are a bit

47:04

more tricky to figure out i guess the general then we’re trying to explore here is

47:10

this complexity for one to transit from being a renter to being an owner because you

47:16

know the more of your income you spend on rent the the harder it is to generate

47:23

uh savings right and in this situation it’s uh it

47:29

is quite hard to think about uh even for us now as people who are far from vancouver

47:35

it’s clear that for people in vancouver it’s very hard to think about ownership so this is

47:41

exactly where we start to also think about kind of new embodiment of doma

47:48

is there a way if we cannot afford homes as individuals to think about

47:55

trying to gain a stake in the city in this kind of way and when we collectively try to pull

48:00

our resources and do something about this situation together uh

48:06

we are still studying this and there will be kind of i i think we’ll in by the end of this

48:11

process we’ll gain even more nuanced understanding of these things also thanks to people like andy and all the other

48:17

people we interviewed and you know like people we have a chance to to talk to but uh basically yes this these things

48:24

will will get their new iteration that is specific to vancouver and um yeah i mean this is kind of the

48:32

rough outline of what we’re working with 221a um it’s very good to be here thanks

48:40

for this invitation and any any thoughts on this will be very much welcomed in the during

48:46

the discussion thank you great thank you maxine that was so nice to see with the green screen

48:51

effect too um we’ll pass it over to um morale who will share um some more about her paper with us

48:59

thanks jesse thanks maxim um nice to see you i think we met before covid in vancouver um

49:06

i don’t have a green screen i do have some slides but uh they’re not gonna stand up to what

49:12

you’ve got going on maxine i’m so sorry um okay let’s see if i can share this

49:18

uh so if y’all can see that um yeah so i mean i think you know

49:27

i i have some kind of slides put together just to kind of generally use this visual prompts and to possibly distract you all from what i’m about to

49:33

say um which really kind of highlights uh of some of the ideas and concepts that

49:38

um i tried to grapple with in the paper that i did for for 221a for the the vacp the

49:43

blockchains and cultural catalogs project um and first i just want to um a big thank you to um jesse obviously

49:50

um and tao from t21a um everyone at t2na and z rosemary heather was on um and rosemary was just the best

49:58

um at you know being thoughtful but uh direct in in her editorial process um and i

50:04

would say the same uh you know the the generativity that came from from everyone at two and it was just so wonderful um it’s really nice to have the

50:11

intellectual generosity that you know this organization brings to the table um

50:17

so just you know thank you um a couple things so you know in terms of kind of just to

50:23

try to take pick up kind of some of the ideas that that makes him was presenting

50:29

um this paper i think you know when we started talking jesse many years ago i think

50:34

back in 2018 maybe um you know we’re both living on the coast i’m calling in from from uh la

50:40

quangan territory otherwise known as victoria british columbia which is like the forgotten island off the coast

50:47

um that uh you know compared to vancouver when we talk about big cities in canada um but we have a

50:53

very similar uh housing affordability crisis in victoria we’re much smaller in terms of kind of population um and

51:01

density as well and very different demographics um but you know jesse and i remember

51:06

chatting and really kind of commiserating over the housing affordability crisis i mean

51:11

like you know to your point i think like some um you know this notion of kind of um thinking about what your ability

51:19

to like whether or not you’re capable of moving from a rent to own scheme um in your life or what a mortgage

51:24

involves and thinking very critically about the fact that yeah you know even though i don’t i’m not a millionaire

51:30

if i were to go to a bank i could probably get a mortgage for over a million dollars it’s quite

51:36

crazy um and quite scary too right um and meanwhile rents in the city like others

51:41

and i think you really highlighted this with your presentation um are just essentially kind of in

51:46

lockstep with what a monthly mortgage payment would look like um which i think really puts these like intensifies these existing

51:52

pressures that have been building um over at least you know 50 years if not longer in different ways um so one of the

51:59

things that i kind of was really interested in and having spent a lot of time working on blockchains in a variety of capacities

52:05

um was this kind of some of the discourses that were circulating at that time about how we might be able to leverage

52:12

you know this technology um to solve that particular crisis and think very critically about um land and

52:18

and in particular kind of in i think the popular discourses of real estate right this notion of kind of um uh squad

52:25

what was it squad wealth um you know that idea that you know okay if maybe i can’t enter that market

52:32

um then perhaps you know together we can and maybe that’ll provide us some entry point into kind of a more kind of sustainable

52:39

housing future um so those are kind of the general kind of ideas that we’re swirling in my head

52:44

and and um you know one of the challenges i think is that there are a lot of discourses

52:50

about the way that we talk about housing and land in particular to go back to to your slide jesse

52:55

um and this notion that you know when we think about land like and i’m i’m always reminded of um tanya

53:01

marie lee you know who has this paper and she says no land’s not like a match you can’t just roll it up

53:07

and take it away right like it’s got this real deep materiality to it um and and that’s really true and i

53:13

think we see that kind of really evident in in projects like doma for instance um they’re really trying to think critically about like how do we kind of

53:19

you know live on the land in different ways um and and uh really i think tutuan has kind of

53:25

foregrounded this a lot with with the research in in this particular project but the other

53:30

kind of way that it circulates obviously is as an investment tool right and we’ve heard uh maximum you’re talking some of the

53:36

contradictions there um and then increasingly with this notion kind of squad wealth um as a consumer good right this notion that if i can

53:42

participate um even partially um then perhaps there are some kind of benefits there to think

53:47

about and so those kind of three um tranches of thinking if you will

53:53

um really kind of uh coalesce in a bizarre way i think when you talk about you know just generally finance and

54:00

housing but also infrastructure um in the context of um of blockchains particularly where you know that maybe

54:06

kind of notion of the materiality itself gets abstracted away that substantiveness of you know what does it

54:11

mean to kind of um have that mutuality um and then some of those anarchist principles kind of

54:18

falls to the side often especially kind of um you know the the private sector where we talk about all of a sudden

54:24

having this ability um to create infrastructure that enables us to essentially kind of um

54:29

take real estate and make it more you know in ghost quotation marks accessible if you will um and one

54:35

particular way that that kind of was really evident back um when i started thinking about this paper was through fractional real estate right and

54:40

this notion that you can take essentially kind of um property as we understand in kind of a general sense um and and split it up

54:46

um so that multiple people can have um access to some component of that investment again really leveraging these notions of

54:51

using it as an investment tool but also consumer good um and you know that i thought was

54:57

really quite curious because it sounds seductive um but if you kind of start looking at it

55:03

you know it really raises this question and people really do promote this of you know these these blockchains do they actually democratize real estate

55:09

do they actually kind of uh lower those barriers to access do they make it like is there actually some outcome here to think about um

55:16

and one of the things that i ended up kind of thinking about was i kept having these conversations um

55:23

both through my research and and also kind of my work at the time um my pay work around kind of fractional

55:28

real estate in particular as being kind of the solution and like this is how we solve this problem you know especially in the context of

55:34

kind of canadian cities um and but one of the challenges that you know

55:40

with blockchains in particular a lot of these projects are um you know they’re experimental um or they might at that point in

55:45

particular just be proof of concept if they’re even that or maybe just a white paper um

55:51

and so i decided to kind of take a bit of a scan and do content analysis of kind of three

55:56

different um instantiations of this idea um so they’re presented here one is real i.t

56:02

um or sorry realty i always get that wrong uh raytiem and doma um with the massive caveat that

56:09

like yeah none of these were essentially kind of production ready in any way um and you know in some ways uh the

56:15

analysis could only be preparatory based on what was available at the time um and with the recognition that like

56:21

this is a really extreme extremely challenging space to to try to do anything so i think you know

56:26

one of the things that i’ve always felt especially since being first exposed to doma is just like absolute i think gratitude

56:33

and um aw you know for the um i think the initiative i think that it

56:39

must take to enter the space and try to do something um productive um so i would

56:45

never have the guts to even try frankly so i think that’s kind of something that undergirds

56:50

everything that i have to say here um but you know in doing this kind of really preparatory

56:56

analysis one thing that kind of became really evident is with the first two which you know um there were so many challenges that

57:02

were seen quite banal frankly but um and and maybe a bit of an anecdote here at the

57:07

time because i was being renovated and i live in this one of these cities that is very similar to vancouver the only

57:13

option i had was to get a mortgage um because it was the same price as getting as paying rent and i was like

57:18

this is ridiculous this is happening last year when i think was wrapping up the paper um and if you’ve ever gone through if

57:24

you haven’t ever had the privilege of having to get a mortgage and it’s not a fun privilege um but one that i definitely have

57:30

um it’s brutal like it’s completely opaque it’s like you just encounter folks that

57:36

don’t give you any information and then just say like please give me all your money and you go okay i don’t have much but here you go

57:42

um and then you just trust the that everything will work out i mean i saw these challenges reproduced essentially with particularly two of

57:48

these platforms um realty and rating where you know when in particular the ownership and management models were completely

57:55

unclear and this reproduces um i think you know real estate experiences as we understand them today at least in

58:01

a western context um in a western seller context where you know for instance with um with both of these um different

58:08

applications you had to be a particular type of investor um you know that was kind of

58:13

legally defined in a certain way under a particular regulatory model to even have access legally to purchase

58:19

you know tokenized claims to portions of a property um which you know doesn’t really solve

58:26

any problem frankly um and the other problem you know so for instance one of them uh with these types of fractionalized real

58:33

estate um uh blockchain solutions there’s a big emphasis on trying to kind

58:38

of yeah tokenize essentially kind of these claims um to a portion of a property um as we understand it um in the legal

58:45

sense and then you know also kind of profit off of the rents that you might be able to um collect

58:50

based on it’s someone essentially kind of um uh managing that that property for you and and the collective of folks who have

58:56

those tokens um and and remit some some kind of um wealth accumulation that way and the management schemes though they

59:03

seem kind of you know ideal in the sense of like oh don’t worry there’s a collective of folks who come and

59:08

take this you know uh property that you own like four percent of um and they’ll send you like two dollars a day um based on the rent schemes um

59:15

completely opaque as well there’s no indication as to how that would work um who’s overseeing it what’s the

59:21

governance model um and that’s quite frightening i think you know in terms of kind of thinking about um what that means in the context of

59:28

one’s investment if you will and even as a consumer good um the other issues that we had that

59:33

kind of became evident with surrounding obviously i think data collection and privacy um so you know both of these particular

59:41

applications really focused heavily on collecting particular data asking you to essentially sign everything away through an app

59:48

um without a lot of recognition that that might be kind of dubious in some ways and that or how they were using that data um and

59:56

and i think this is kind of a very common trope at this point unfortunately that we run into with with digital

1:00:01

technologies and datification in particular um and finally um the documentation for

1:00:06

both of these was extremely limited it was extremely clear and and also was lacking details

1:00:12

surrounding kind of your regulatory obligations um you know and i think this is something that um um is really challenging and again

1:00:18

really quite banal to talk about but there are rules about how you can invest in things

1:00:24

um and you can break them and you know like for instance i like maxine that you’re you’re noting that’s you know

1:00:29

it’s currently illegal to such a kind of co-invest uh in kiev um and that might not be

1:00:36

evident to folks uh and there might be ramifications surrounding that and you know if we want to kind of um intervene in those types of

1:00:44

um regulatory barriers it’s a very different question than just trying to you know sign up for something thinking that it’s kind of a low-risk investment

1:00:51

and then having to deal with the outcomes of it actually being quite high risk personally downstream

1:00:58

so um the third kind of uh example that i looked at and again it was you know i’m mindful that doma you’ve kind of been working

1:01:04

very hard i think on doing something that’s quite challenging and it’s again by the time i was looking at this

1:01:10

i think it was uh uh it was still kind of work in progress um but kind of an antidote to those two other

1:01:17

uh examples that i just talked about briefly um was doma right and there’s this notion that essentially um you try to kind of instead of

1:01:23

reproducing um real estate as we understand it and even property relations um i think what dom is trying to do is

1:01:29

something really neat which is you’re trying to hack real estate um by looking at fractional ownership so

1:01:34

again taking kind of you know deeds to properties and trusting them up um but seeking rent to own models that are

1:01:40

based on like kind of collective equity right towards the affordability um and you know there’s kind of this um

1:01:46

this many-to-many relationship that you’re trying to really kind of leveraging network effects um which i think is like such a

1:01:53

a challenging thing to kind of pull off but it’s really laudable i think in the context of this particular

1:01:59

housing affordability crisis um because you know when you’re trying to essentially

1:02:04

so and i might be mischaracterizing it back soon so please call me out on it um but one of the things that i thought

1:02:09

was really neat is that here um where you’re instead of um sorry

1:02:14

my screen might have been weird um instead of just kind of taking you know a particular property splitting it up and tokenizing and

1:02:21

saying okay now you have access to this like one percent of of of this particular property um

1:02:26

you know you try to kind of um do that and then leverage the equity as you were talking about um to essentially kind of access other

1:02:33

markets right i think that’s one of the intents um and that notion of leveraging equity

1:02:38

across markets um in an otherwise quite illiquid but global market is pretty cool and it’s also

1:02:46

really hard i think for people to internalize like what that means um and how it operates um and so i think

1:02:52

you know in a mindful time and i don’t want to um to just kind of uh talk about my paper um and i’d rather

1:03:00

listen to folks on the call and have a good discussion but one of the things that i thought was really neat is that you know where you have kind of two examples that

1:03:06

really just kind of reproduce the status quo in some ways um but do it under the guise of kind of sharing

1:03:13

um i think doma provides kind of this this alternative um where you know you might actually

1:03:19

just just even though you’re still kind of operating in the same system um you might actually provide ways for

1:03:24

people to build that equity collectively um in a way that kind of is more aligned with mutual thinking and

1:03:30

mutual aid um and towards kind of uh potentially kind of being able to create

1:03:35

spaces that are more accessible um in markets that are otherwise completely

1:03:41

exclusionary um and that’s really hard to like sit with

1:03:47

frankly it’s it’s something that i keep thinking about because i don’t you know it almost felt too good to be true

1:03:53

um when i first heard the work you’re doing and then you know the more that you sit with it and think about it

1:03:58

it’s really well thought out it’s really kind of well um designed i think um and it’s it’s the kind of

1:04:04

work that i think um many people should be looking at and so like you know in brief you know do

1:04:10

blockchains democratize real estate not usually i think but maybe

1:04:15

and you know one of the kind of some key takeaways were that especially with the realty and radium

1:04:21

examples um and those more kind of traditional if you will kind of capitalist approaches um

1:04:27

to fractionalize real estate using blockchains there’s really kind of an emphasis on digitization to mediate existing

1:04:32

like forms of enclosure um in some ways intensifying them in some ways trying to kind of create the veil that there is

1:04:38

greater access but not really um the other thing that i kind of noted is that it intensifies rent extraction

1:04:43

in some cases um there’s this i didn’t quite talk about this but one of the challenges when you start

1:04:49

tokenizing real estate and then try to use a rent to own model that’s predicated on

1:04:55

kind of essentially kind of a speculative store value in some cases is that some of these schemes really

1:05:02

kind of operated on the model that you could get folks to pay rent daily

1:05:07

which sounds great maybe um but it really presumes that folks renting have liquidity and have

1:05:13

access to those resources on a day-to-day basis um which is quite terrible in some cases and it can

1:05:19

actually create new spaces of exclusion um the other issue is that yeah it obfuscates compliance requirements for

1:05:26

those uninitiated real estate investors and so that notion that you know um housing should operate as this

1:05:31

you know form of investment tool or consumer good sounds great perhaps to

1:05:37

people who are looking to to leverage what little equity they might have or trying to access an otherwise really

1:05:43

exclusionary market um but what it actually does is that it it puts a lot of risk on the

1:05:48

end user um and it introduces new forms of datification and data valence and oh

1:05:53

there’s a typo there i apologize um and and that’s you know something that i think a lot of scholars um

1:05:59

that are interested in any kind of digitization and identification have noted with other technologies and so there is

1:06:04

that kind of caveat there um in other cases though zoma shows you know it reformats property relations in

1:06:11

some ways which i think is kind of an interesting way to think about it it’s really challenging to sit with again um to think about what that means right

1:06:17

i mean to go from a rent to own model uh where you don’t have to put up a bunch of money um and maybe

1:06:25

you know over time you could leverage that investment to create kind of more equity in a

1:06:32

different market um is kind of an interesting idea it also uses networking capabilities um

1:06:38

of of the blockchain i think to enable these more kind of communal forms of equity and this is

1:06:44

kind of that many to many relationship that i think dome a lot of your work kind of speaks to um and i think it can maybe

1:06:51

hack the affordability crisis by leveraging that um that equity to different markets um and

1:06:56

again i think the particular flavor that would enable us to democratize real estate um is something very similar to doma

1:07:03

where it’s kind of coming from a particular kind of positioning that is not just looking to maximize profit for

1:07:08

kind of an individual profit or gain um but something that’s a lot more collectivist and rooted in kind of this

1:07:14

this smart commons idea so um sorry i’ve said a lot of words at

1:07:20

you so maybe i’ll just stop there um and yeah i think again the it’s a challenging topic to

1:07:26

talk about because ultimately and i think this is what you’re talking about at the top of the

1:07:31

the panel jesse there’s this constant tension of how we use blockchains and how they get conflated with these kind of ideologies

1:07:38

when that’s not necessarily what they’re used but that’s not other use case um and and i think that’s kind of an ongoing

1:07:44

point of interrogation so maybe i’ll just stop there yeah yeah thank you morale i mean i think

1:07:50

where we’re at in terms of that is it’s a new technology right and

1:07:55

um ben cerveny from from a great data foundation in amsterdam kind of says that technology is

1:08:02

technology for maybe 20 years but then it gets acculturated and turned into like an infrastructure that’s more rigid

1:08:09

and solid so we’re kind of in this moment right now where these competing use cases and kind of ideologies behind the tech

1:08:15

are going to drive its adoption and we’ll see which way it goes so obviously i can tell where where you’d place your

1:08:22

bats in our tutu and it would place its bats on what we’d like to see um but we’ll hand it over to ian now maybe you could tell

1:08:29

us a bit about the researchers that you’ve been doing in a platform real estate as we leave this sharing economy and

1:08:34

look towards like maybe a new internet of value absolutely um thanks jesse and and thank

1:08:40

you morale and maxine for sharing some of your uh your work and um you know it’s it’s just it’s exciting

1:08:47

to see uh both the theoretical leg work kind of being executed

1:08:53

around these questions as well as the work that doma is doing to sort of investigate various kinds of

1:09:00

crises and try to consolidate some of that power back into the hands of of tenants um

1:09:06

so i’m excited to be here as um as jesse said my name is ian i’m a phd candidate at the university of

1:09:11

kentucky um studying uh more or less how digital property technologies

1:09:18

change and uh and structure our relationships to housing and home um i have

1:09:24

uh some comments on uh or you know maybe some comments questions on uh the presentations that both of

1:09:31

y’all just just gave but maybe i’ll i’ll save those until we we can kind of uh converse as

1:09:36

a panel and just just give a a general overview of um of some of my research and and some

1:09:43

reflections on uh the relationships between uh what what i’m just going to call prop tech today and processes of housing

1:09:51

financialization uh both globally and in some situated examples so i’ll go ahead and show you

1:09:58

my screen um and let’s see

1:10:03

there it is um so can everybody uh see that okay great um

1:10:11

all right uh so so like i said i’m gonna be talking about and sort of reflecting on uh the global

1:10:17

housing crisis um in a couple of different ways here both in terms of the financialization of

1:10:23

housing and um and some of these digital technologies for the management transaction of housing um and and

1:10:31

home right what what that means for how we relate as individuals to spaces of like like intimate spaces of

1:10:38

home um so i i do want to take a moment just to just a very

1:10:43

explicitly thank jesse and the folks at 221a for putting this on um as well as uh uh andy who i’m excited to hear from uh

1:10:50

shortly um and and i wanna i wanna move move forward uh with this talk

1:10:55

um with us what i think is a somewhat uncontroversial statement um we’re in the midst of an ongoing

1:11:02

housing crisis it’s an affordability crisis that’s rooted in the global dominion of capital

1:11:08

settler colonial logics of land uh and ownership uh and the racial and spatial segregation of home and home ownership

1:11:14

and rentership um it’s also a crisis that plays out on the landscape of people’s everyday lives

1:11:20

and and we all have very different relationships to what that crisis means and does

1:11:25

um but i just want to take a moment here to to maybe think uh about what it means to be in an

1:11:31

ongoing crisis and i’m sure that we can think of a number of examples here um

1:11:36

but drilling down a bit it might begin to sound like a sort of paradox or an

1:11:41

oxymoron right we normally think of crises as events or moments that shock and then lead to aftershocks um and if a

1:11:47

crisis is an event that happens uh for something to happen it needs to start and end

1:11:53

um it’s it might be kind of hard to conceptualize a crisis is ongoing and ambient and around us all the time

1:12:00

um so so i want to give some context to this and and maybe suggest some start dates for how we can think

1:12:06

about the global housing crisis following some research by raquel rolnick an amazing housing scholar i’m going to use the

1:12:13

late 70s and early 80s as a reference point here it’s during that time that we start to see the economic function of housing

1:12:19

start to undergo a paradigm shift that really sees global housing policy uh

1:12:24

transformed from making its goal uh not the well-being of people but the health of housing and

1:12:30

financial markets and then through things like retirement plans and mortgage contracts

1:12:35

we increasingly see the health of people being yoked and subsequently tied to the health of financial markets

1:12:41

not that these processes weren’t already happening but they really pick up steam around that time for a lot of different reasons now today

1:12:48

we’re beginning to see the contours of what we might call a new asset economy emerge an economy where

1:12:54

the ownership of assets things like housing is more meaningful in in constituting

1:12:59

your class position than your labor power and housing of course like i said is the asset sort of our excellence and

1:13:06

it’s it’s increasingly consolidated in the hands of the financial elite as we know um even even with a start date

1:13:14

here uh that still doesn’t really answer the question of how a crisis can be ongoing and sort of existing around us

1:13:20

all the time and so i want to turn for a moment to lauren berlant a philosopher who who writes about

1:13:26

crisis in a way that grounds it in these moments of ordinary everyday life she calls this crisis ordinariness and

1:13:32

suggests that while crisis may be triggered by an event the process that leads to crisis

1:13:38

and therefore the crisis itself were was always there all along she argues that labeling something a

1:13:44

crisis can sometimes amount to a redefinitional tactic and the tactic is used to make phenomenon appear

1:13:50

suddenly as though they were events and in some cases this can conceal the processes

1:13:56

that contribute to the origin of crisis and how it perpetuates itself

1:14:01

so ananya roy a planning scholar at ucla encourages us to think and cast the processes that

1:14:08

lead to crisis instead in a framework for housing justice and the question of housing she writes

1:14:13

must be understood in relation to juridical political structures the legal order of property to state-sanctioned

1:14:19

violence and surveillance so by extension the housing question must be understood in relation to

1:14:24

justice put a bit more plainly by tracy gene rosenthal of the l.a tenants union

1:14:29

when we call this crisis a housing crisis it benefits the people who design housing who profit from housing not the people

1:14:35

who live in it so i wanted to start with this provocation about what crisis means because i think that it’s important to

1:14:42

understand it not strictly as a moment or an event but as this ongoing process that can reveal its own conditions by

1:14:49

through continuous forms of happening in the case of housing the ongoing

1:14:54

crisis conditions include commodification and colonialism imperialism neoliberal racial capitalism

1:15:00

all of the things that we sort of understand is these structures and conditions beneath uh

1:15:06

experiences of housing precarity as ananya roy insists dismantling these conditions

1:15:11

in the pursuit of housing justice and tenants rights requires nothing short of abolition

1:15:16

so like like morale i’m i’m also a critical humanistic geographer uh and as i said i

1:15:23

research how basically geospatial technologies structure our relationships to the places that we inhabit um it felt natural in a lot of ways to

1:15:30

gravitate to digital property technologies again prop tech for my doctoral research in literal terms you

1:15:37

know prop tech might be the consummate kind of technology that structures our relationships to where we live

1:15:44

my research program asks how the design and use of crop tech changes our relationships to housing at home and

1:15:50

this involves basically going to a lot of real estate and tech conferences as well as speaking with software

1:15:56

engineers and various kinds of reps of these proptech firms to try and understand some of the logics that go into producing

1:16:02

softwares for the management and transaction of real estate in particular housing

1:16:07

so these technologies can serve different kinds of goals often at once as morale excellently

1:16:14

highlights sometimes they can easily facilitate the financialization of housing they might imagine new forms of

1:16:20

collective ownership as as we’ve seen with the example of doma um sometimes they

1:16:25

might do both at once in complicated ways um and and while proptech as an industry

1:16:30

bears the marks of the silicon valley upstart culture uh tries to disrupt through innovation and

1:16:36

all of that um it’s exciting to see ways in which prop tech is being designed in a

1:16:41

battle for housing justice um so following anonya roy and the way that she kind of frames

1:16:46

an approach to housing through justice and abolition i propose that we might call these prop techs abolitionist proptech and

1:16:53

doma is certainly not alone in developing technologies that uh disrupt um the kind of standard

1:16:59

prevailing regimes of housing as jesse has also highlighted today um so in my remaining time i want to

1:17:04

give some context on the state of housing relationship to financial markets um and offer some specific remarks coming out

1:17:11

of my research about how conventional prop tech fits into this rubric of housing finance um

1:17:16

i’ll just conclude by providing some examples in addition to doma of abolitionist prop tech that i think

1:17:21

is working in exciting ways in pursuit of more livable housing landscape so

1:17:26

just some background here when i say housing financialization i’m referring to the mass privatization of housing as an asset

1:17:33

um today the landscape of housing financialization is really dominated by corporate landlords um seeking the

1:17:40

creation of shareholder value this is kind of where prop tech comes into play it’s often used to

1:17:46

efficiently manage these large geographically disparate property portfolios at scale so for

1:17:52

example invitation homes or american homes for rents these are both uh largely u.s examples though uh

1:18:00

you know with the kind of flows of financial capital it’s increasingly globalized but

1:18:06

invitation homes is the largest corporate landlord in the world their portfolio of

1:18:11

single family rental homes exceeds 80 000 properties um they need lots of software and hardware implementations to automate

1:18:18

day-to-day tasks across these apartments and homes so that’s where proptech comes in and it often presents

1:18:24

itself as very banal sorts of implementations for things like

1:18:29

uh you know access and entry or paying rent online um so it’s important i think to pry open

1:18:36

those sorts of everyday interactions that we have with these softwares or hardwares to figure out what purpose they’re sort of

1:18:42

uh serving and engaging and i think it’s from this paradigm of housing financialization that prop tech emerges as a useful tool for

1:18:49

landlords so some context on the proptech landscape i’ll be talking specifically

1:18:55

about the u.s where my research is based but this certainly applies in

1:19:01

many other contexts too so this map here approximates proptech firms in the u.s they’re

1:19:06

scattered all across the country predictably clustered in major cities with

1:19:12

some over-representation in new york and san francisco um but just to give you a sense of how these

1:19:17

uh firms where where these firms are locating and kind of what kinds of markets they they view as

1:19:22

important places to implement the software um uh a kind of cursory media analysis

1:19:28

uh that i conducted shows proptech has been mentioned in over 470 press articles since 2015 that

1:19:35

number has certainly gone up uh since i made this graph it probably goes up every day

1:19:40

um 80 of the mentions uh were since january 2019 uh venture capital investment has more

1:19:48

than quadrupled in this sector between 2015 and 2018 so so we can really see that the

1:19:53

interest um at least from the business and investor community is is kind of consolidating around this tech

1:19:59

as an object of investment and design and use so many of those articles frame proptech

1:20:05

in terms of exactly the kind of stuff that morale is talking about in her in her great paper and uh in this um

1:20:12

uh talk today right so disruption innovation a revolution in real estate i’ve read a

1:20:18

number of books uh by proptech entrepreneurs i grabbed a couple of them today

1:20:26

make real estate great again uh proptech 101 some fascinating reads that

1:20:32

i wouldn’t necessarily recommend um you know and in all of these all of

1:20:37

these books and reports self-published books most of the time on proptech they emphasize the democratizing power

1:20:43

of this tech the transparency that it creates and the cost savings that it passes on to customers and and again as morale

1:20:50

mentions these are real issues in a lot of cases you know the mortgage process can be incredibly intimidating and opaque

1:20:56

um and complicated so like many uh you know like many technical

1:21:02

implementations these are grounded in a sense of uh reality um but suffice to say the

1:21:07

interest that’s growing in this sector is largely about reducing the spatial frictions

1:21:13

that are created by housing financialization so the majority of these are investor focused technologies developed

1:21:18

in the interest of capital accumulation while being marketed as transparent democratizing and

1:21:23

simplifying so again as as jessie mentioned we can see corollaries here to the sharing economy

1:21:28

of you know maybe 10 years ago as that movement is starting to to pick up steam now given the hype

1:21:35

around proptech it can be hard to kind of evaluate what it introduces if anything new uh joe shaw geographer clarifies this by

1:21:42

pointing out the software stack is key here so i just want to take a moment to highlight this um the

1:21:48

stack performs two functions uh it relies on standard protocols of digital information or what we’ll call

1:21:54

interoperability and second it connects market participants through uh contingent passive action

1:22:00

or platformization now these two processes are really what separate proptech from older forms of property surveillance

1:22:06

like things like old 19th century pedometers or a surveyor’s chain for example um so

1:22:13

this is this is how we can sort of say you know what’s new here these are really the dynamics that i that i want to emphasize

1:22:18

and i want to look at an example now of how this stuff works in one of the most notoriously controversial proptech firms

1:22:24

airbnb a short-term rental vacation platform that connects prospective apartments

1:22:30

apartment renters with prospective apartment hosts over the years it’s faced lots of

1:22:36

criticism for um gentrification and neighborhood change and in the past this is some of the stuff that my other researchers looked

1:22:42

at um but something interesting happened with airbnb in the last year uh they instituted a global ban on

1:22:48

parties so this crackdown was in response certainly to the widespread criticism of

1:22:54

professional airbnb listings that despite uh existing in residential neighborhoods basically function as

1:22:59

uh party hotels um which is a kind of common thing that you see in critiques of airbnb

1:23:04

so how does airbnb uh which i would consider a proptech firm manage and enforce this ban the answer

1:23:11

is uh by way of other proptech implementations so the first thing is that airbnb now rejects guests

1:23:17

if they don’t meet certain criteria such as being under the age of 25 or lacking a positive review history the

1:23:24

rejection this is just an example of the text is based on algorithmic and some manual reviews of

1:23:30

what airbnb calls risk factors that might lead to parties so they’re uh this is sort of a predictive uh way of

1:23:37

forestalling complaints about their platform the second thing uh is a bit more

1:23:43

insidious i think um airbnb sells proptech to its hosts so here are

1:23:48

some examples from airbnb’s party prevention page uh of proptech implementations that

1:23:54

airbnb markets under its advice noise aware minute and room monitor all

1:23:59

of these devices are basically variations of the same idea they monitor noise levels in a home and

1:24:04

send reports to the property owner or manager so noise aware explains that it allows

1:24:10

hosts to quote be there without being there according to the website the device quote sits quietly in the moments where

1:24:16

problems arise giving you insight into places that weren’t possible before and the tools to solve issues before

1:24:22

they go too far so in addition to being a sort of strange intrusion intrusion

1:24:28

into privacy for prospective renters uh we can analyze the marketing of noise monitoring proptech uh in the context of

1:24:35

housing financialization um again to reference morale’s paper airbnb

1:24:40

effectively functions as a means of transforming housing into a financial asset or facilitating the ease of that

1:24:46

transformation in making that happen though airbnb runs into all sorts of frictions like city

1:24:51

governments that are upset with them for evading taxes neighbors who complain about nuisances next door

1:24:57

and broad coalitions of anti-airbnb activists who rally against inflation and

1:25:02

rent prices and home values now as they face the music airbnb is

1:25:08

attempting to resolve these frictions through greater surveillance via more software and hardware implementations

1:25:13

without acknowledging that the whole model is built on a faulty foundation in short uh you know airbnb created a

1:25:20

problem that they’re now selling hosts a solution for i think it’s how we might boil this down um and it’s a bit mind-boggling and

1:25:27

you know too little too late for many users on whom the popular opinion of airbnb is souring

1:25:32

uh recently airbnb was pretty widely panned across twitter and some news outlets for

1:25:38

high fees and poor service and while these critiques were often funny they missed the point in many cases

1:25:43

airbnb’s fees are so high now because they’re following the rules and conforming to local occupancy taxes and

1:25:50

opening regulations so the allure of the platform to live locally while traveling affordably was

1:25:55

always a fiction predicated on evading their fair share of the burden and it goes to show that when they play by the rules the platform really doesn’t work

1:26:02

well at all um so returning now to my original point here interoperability and platformization are

1:26:08

expressions of power that can re-inscribe existing inequities in housing and property relations right interoperability is about connecting

1:26:15

these data points through shared standards um hardware implementations like noise

1:26:20

monitors are certainly examples of this and likewise platformization obscures dynamics of power and pursuit of value

1:26:27

capture which can have negative impacts for tenants um desiree fields an incredible geographer actually put me in touch with

1:26:33

uh two two one a uh for today um she argues that

1:26:38

platforms like airbnb creates situations in which people get caught up in the imperative to reduce uh friction

1:26:44

and extract yield by closing the space between security and precarity for tenants so these people are what we might think

1:26:51

of as the unwilling subjects of platformization um to kind of paraphrase some of her research and proptech affects them in

1:26:57

ways that extend way beyond and indeed more nefariously than vacation rentals i i want to

1:27:04

move on and uh i’ll try to wrap this up soon because i know we have a lot more time and i’d like to hear from andy

1:27:10

i just want to want to go through three um examples here uh of proptech firms that basically

1:27:17

developed within put to use and replicate some existing inequalities in housing uh to borrow language from simone brown

1:27:23

um so i’ll begin here with neighborly the landlord’s credit business um

1:27:28

there was some uh but basically some coverage around this platform uh in the

1:27:34

wake of covid um right and uh on april 2nd uh when it became very apparent that uh

1:27:42

people were not gonna be able to pay rent uh widely when the pandemic hit

1:27:47

dylan lenz the ceo of neighborly circulated an email to the company’s users neighborly is basically a

1:27:56

risk profile curator you know they they consolidate lots of different data points on tenants and

1:28:02

uh give that information to landlords um so len circulated an email around this time uh to all of their clients uh to to

1:28:10

utilize neighborly’s tenant review function especially including data on whether tenants missed rent on april 1st

1:28:16

in order to create a database of potentially delinquent or insolvent renters to quote that email the database helps

1:28:23

other landlords know in the future if the tenant’s been delinquent in the past so in addition to flying foul of the

1:28:30

fair credit reporting act uh neighborly kind of shows us how tenant data can keep access to housing

1:28:35

and is circulated through these prop tech platforms another example zumper

1:28:41

zumper strives to be the airbnb for one year listings uh one year leasing however in 2017 some performed a branch

1:28:49

of tenant screening services called zumper select and a business insider report found that

1:28:54

they systematically screened out section 8 tenants who inquired about apartments on the site

1:29:00

um now while exclusionary practices and tenants greening are as old as the real estate industry itself

1:29:05

zumper’s systematic denial was different because it it basically relied on these dynamics of

1:29:11

platformization and interoperability within zumper internally unserviceable

1:29:18

uh was a word that functioned as a code word for government assistant renter a category which over represented black

1:29:23

and latin next tenants from lower income brackets so this is functionally no different from redlining policies under the fha

1:29:29

for example that give black neighborhoods the ostensibly race neutral descriptor subprime

1:29:35

but we can see how it reconstitutes itself in these predictive ways based on triangulating different kinds

1:29:42

of data points against each other to conclude i just want to look at the real estate brokerage firm redfin

1:29:50

so they have a company policy that requires properties to be listed at a minimum price determined algorithmically from housing

1:29:55

market to market um now recently a lawsuit filed by the national fair housing alliance alleges

1:30:01

redfin’s minimum home price policy of excluding buyers and sellers of homes in non-white areas

1:30:06

from being able to use their services so this isn’t i’m showing you an example here of uh

1:30:11

louisville kentucky um and we can see the kind of racial and spatial segregation

1:30:16

of uh home listings that are made available mapped against demographics particularly

1:30:22

non-white and white populations in the city and the basic takeaway is that if you live in a black neighborhood it’s

1:30:29

highly less likely that you’ll be able to participate in the markets created by this platform the housing markets

1:30:34

created by this platform so sarah sofranski has described these kinds of things as processes of

1:30:40

algorithmic violence basically a standardized form of

1:30:45

violence that contribute contributes to the racialization of space and the spatialization of poverty

1:30:51

um when mapped onto the existing historical geographies of exclusion that we we kind of see through these proptech

1:30:58

firms i think that um it’s clear that these resolve all kinds of frictions that prop tech

1:31:05

you know identifies in financial markets but for many marginalized tenants and homeowners they introduce new frictions that are

1:31:13

less important to resolve for the circulation of capital so um just by way of conclusion

1:31:18

uh i want to highlight some abolitionist prop tech um kind of tentatively calling uh

1:31:25

this category right um landlord tech watch map is a anti-efficient mapping projects work

1:31:32

that collects implementations of proptech in people’s homes that they don’t like

1:31:37

or want inside airbnb scrapes data and provides visualizations about airbnb

1:31:42

listings just fix nyc is an app for a wide range of tools like getting your properties

1:31:47

rent history or a profile on your landlord and then tenant power is an ai powered boston massachusetts map that

1:31:54

allows you to explore city assessors data to identify other properties that your landlord lord

1:32:00

also owns and to this list we can certainly add uh doma’s dashboard for exploring the

1:32:05

housing crisis um and a lot of their other work around understanding and

1:32:10

interrogating the conditions that create unequitable relations of housing um so thanks for listening i i’m really

1:32:17

excited to talk more about um the uh the work and the research that we’ve seen today and

1:32:22

please let me know if y’all have any questions uh you want to see like a bibliography or links to these uh these organizations

1:32:28

stuff like that um we can chat so so thanks and i’ll pass it over uh to andy now

1:32:35

andy you’re still muted right now yes the the the most common statement in 2020

1:32:41

and 2021 um thank you so much and uh thank you ian and and and then thank you

1:32:48

jesse n221a for the invitation to uh speak to you today um i really wanted to kind of i think

1:32:55

keep my comments short because i think that the panel discussion i think is really this opportunity for a fountain of of of of i

1:33:02

think of this course in terms of what’s going on in terms of i think uh property technology uh i

1:33:10

think in its in in in in a number of forms and i think that in one way i think what brings us together is

1:33:16

really the opportunity to kind of see proptech as a form of social justice but then i think that

1:33:22

what ian has done is certainly i think showed how it can be used the other way around and so i think that within that kind of

1:33:29

understanding and i think this is perhaps the uh the the kind of underlying tone of technology in pretty much the uh

1:33:37

20th and 21st centuries that i think that it kind of goes into i think an area of interest of

1:33:43

mine as i kind of progress forward and in my research in housing and i think

1:33:49

um these days a lot of my interest is actually focused on rental and understanding the nature of rental

1:33:54

and in ways through which i think in particular to acknowledge actually the roles of the formal and the

1:34:00

informal and actually how they’ve interacted together and actually how it is within the informal

1:34:06

ideas of rental that we’ve actually seen i think the opportunities for justice in ways that i think are operate

1:34:14

invisibly and yet are in one way taken for granted um one i think that one of the

1:34:20

discussions is really i think around the fact that in vancouver as we kind of go through the citywide plan

1:34:26

i mean it’s really interesting to kind of see how the city planners have kind of talked about how vancouver is a

1:34:32

renter city and the expectation was that well we’ve been a renter city since you know what probably 2006 but the fact of the matter

1:34:40

is when you actually look at the record of vancouver vancouver has been the city of vancouver that is

1:34:46

has actually been a majority renter’s city since 1971 that it was actually quite surprising to

1:34:54

actually find that the city has been a city of renters since 1971

1:35:00

um simply because i think most people had expected that it was only very very recent and i think that that we became the city

1:35:06

of interest and i think that the question i think then goes into really what uh why we haven’t had that

1:35:13

recognition why that hasn’t come into that conversation and i think that in one way it very much talks about privilege it talks about how

1:35:20

the property owning class is the property owning status ownership culture has kind of dominated i think the the

1:35:28

the the discourse in bank in in in this city and in in the region and probably from i think

1:35:34

throughout north america and i think that is entirely problematic is really we we talk about the rules of social justice

1:35:40

and and and being at like anti-colonial and looking at these kind of unequal relationships but then i

1:35:48

think you focus in and then talk about the role of formality and informality in the

1:35:54

rental market in vancouver you actually find that the majority of renters actually in

1:36:01

metropolitan vancouver 62 actually are in what’s called the secondary rental marketplace

1:36:08

that is they are not in the mass majority of renters in vancouver

1:36:15

are not in purpose-built rental they’re actually in these types of relationships with

1:36:22

landlords that aren’t necessarily in buildings that were built to be rental but yet i think is important to

1:36:30

recognize the spectrum of those relationships we do indeed have i think this incredibly pernicious

1:36:37

rentier class that’s involved in that type of rental but then on the other side of it in that informal

1:36:44

reality is a series of i think very

1:36:49

old ideas around fractionalized ownership and housing by any number of

1:36:56

social social organizations through which provided levels of affordable housing the

1:37:02

marketplace would never produce and i think that it’s in that sector that it hasn’t been

1:37:08

acknowledged or recognized i i think the most interesting things is that it’s also helped produce a level of

1:37:13

urbanization i think in vancouver that actually hasn’t been really talked about the um original i think location of 221a

1:37:21

is in an example of that type of building that actually came together particularly in places

1:37:26

like chinatown that came together in terms of that type of formalized uh that type of factionalized ownership

1:37:33

and i think that it’s coming in that type of realization it’s also then when you start looking into particular

1:37:38

neighborhoods you actually find that in certain neighborhoods 97 of that rental of all the rental

1:37:45

in very in certain neighborhoods in the city of vancouver are actually in this secondary marketplace this this

1:37:51

informal marketplace and i think that that also i think is important to recognize this

1:37:56

because as we kind of begin on a political level to valorize purpose-built rental we don’t there

1:38:03

isn’t necessarily understanding that they only provide a certain type of rental for a certain population

1:38:09

for a certain characteristic that they’re perhaps really good in terms of producing rental housing for studio for stu for

1:38:17

singles and for couples but also at market rates so that these days in vancouver those market

1:38:23

rates are typically in ways through which are completely outside the ranges and affordability of

1:38:30

traditional renters and much less the kind of diverse characteristics of those

1:38:35

living in rental housing i think that that really goes into then

1:38:41

i think this discussion about the interaction not only between housing tenure but then between housing types

1:38:46

and as such really the discussion about action what you discover is that in this kind of informal pool of rental

1:38:53

you actually find that’s precisely where much of the rental housing for families

1:38:58

are going to be that they’re ground oriented they’re located in neighborhoods that are family friendly

1:39:04

they’re not in this kind of hyper urban uh vancouverism kind of flash in the pan

1:39:09

kind of idea of what the city is but then it is truly the essence of what i think makes

1:39:15

vancouver a great city or being being somebody who grew up in this city that it was this type of availability in

1:39:23

terms of this type of housing this type of rental housing in terms of it’s not only

1:39:28

affordability but then it’s suitability that i think is important to acknowledge and to observe but then at the same time

1:39:35

the role that i think ian has talked in terms of proptech the emergence of air b it has i think

1:39:42

in any number of cities around north america around the world has absolutely i think run aside

1:39:50

right through this type of rental that it has attempted to formalize it has attempted

1:39:55

codified it has attempted to ossify these ideas of rental of rental and the and its relationships

1:40:03

to uh two tenants and i think has done an incredible damage in terms of

1:40:10

the fabric of affordable housing um i think that it’s now touching upon that being said i think

1:40:17

the discussion i think today is really about the opportunities i think in blockchain to introduce and

1:40:25

and a level of transparency and to really i think bring forward and perhaps offer an

1:40:31

opportunity in terms of evening out the kind of informational asymmetries there are in these

1:40:36

relationships and as as in that process you now then have the possibilities of

1:40:42

i think these types of technologies as part of a social justice agenda it’s not going to be perfect i think

1:40:48

it’s a number of challenges but yet at least we can at least begin and bring forward that type of

1:40:54

conversation now that being said i think it’s also connecting up to i think uh existing policy

1:41:01

uh tools i i think the idea of registry that the idea of a rental

1:41:08

rent uh a rental housing registry is really just actually quite simple in terms of a comprehensive uh inventory

1:41:14

of rental stock in terms of buildings and units rents and lease terms um it’s it’s it can be found in

1:41:21

baltimore seattle denver miami a number of cities and through which helps inform

1:41:26

and understand the state of rental in these respective cities that i think uh

1:41:32

actually in canada we don’t have that is actually it’s surprising because as we see agencies like major agencies

1:41:39

uh the the canadian mortgage and housing uh corporation the the equivalent of fannie mae and freddie mac

1:41:45

in in in the us i like to try to speak some american once in a while um that you really actually have

1:41:53

this i think discussion now about what does canada become in terms of a rental

1:41:58

society and yet i think within that conversation it’s not having the infrastructure to

1:42:04

become a rental society it’s not really truly understanding the power asymmetries being in a rental

1:42:10

society can have and i think without dealing with those asymmetries i think that it’s

1:42:15

now bringing forward if not reinforcing levels of inequality through which we only have

1:42:21

yet at this point to really understand now i think that bringing forward this

1:42:26

discussion of fractionalized ownership i think that it’s really i think one that one has to be very careful

1:42:32

on in terms of discussion because of the possibilities of recommending

1:42:38

real estate but then at the same time there’s also that flip side of further hyper commodifying real estate

1:42:45

and i think that that is something that i think is a very i think key fundamental principle in terms of

1:42:51

that type of conversation and it’s to really not to say we shouldn’t do it but that it’s

1:42:56

really i think within the idea of fractionalized ownership and really how we move from the physical

1:43:02

to the digital and take advantage of all the possibilities that brings forward you have to also remember we also that

1:43:09

has began with condominiums that if you read the kind of work of doug harris and the evolution of how

1:43:17

the condo came about in in law in british columbia it’s a remarkable legal history

1:43:24

and it’s actually it’s worth i think exploring and understanding that you know that it has been done in a much

1:43:29

more analog method beginning in the 1960s and moving it forward and how does it kind of plug in to this

1:43:36

conversation of blockchain technology and its opportunities and the peril of

1:43:42

recommending it and i think that really finally it really is to really now i think begin and looking

1:43:49

critically at this dialogue of talking about and looking and talking about you know canadian cities as

1:43:55

perhaps one to pursue uh being a cultural renters of a renter being

1:44:01

renters now i think in one way being valorized that i think that we still have substantial

1:44:06

and major challenges in terms of moving from being cities of renters to being cities

1:44:13

for renters so i’ll leave that conversation there and i’ll open up for the panel great

1:44:19

thank you so much andy ian morale and next team and yeah we can echo

1:44:24

um andy we’ve had a lot of trouble finding rental data to kind of reinforce um the dashboard that dome has been

1:44:31

doing so we can definitely attest to that and i think what’s interesting about blockchain as a technology is that

1:44:37

what it can do is it can also reinforce existing forms of

1:44:43

decentralization that already exists in our in our societies so as you’re talking about this informality in the

1:44:48

rental market actually this is an optimistic thing for us to hear kind of doing this research

1:44:54

and then knowing that historically that marker of the city reaching a majority of internship like

1:44:59

as far back as the 1970s is optimistic because you know given the right communication tools and

1:45:06

community building mechanisms what we could do is we could reinforce what those networks already are which

1:45:12

provides space to people which are probably going to be below market because most people can’t afford market and you just wonder where i just

1:45:18

walk on the streets and wonder where do you live how do you live i see a mother with three children and a pram where are you living how many

1:45:24

children are in one bedroom are you sharing it with them um so obviously there’s people already doing this decentralization

1:45:31

and existing and living and finding ways to make this work and those are through different forms of agreements and arrangements

1:45:36

um between partners so um with that in mind i wonder if i could

1:45:42

ask the question um yeah just just about those existing forms of of decentralized forms of

1:45:48

living and and how do you see us reinforcing them with with these kind of platforms and

1:45:53

um thank you maybe and you have some ideas too because you spend a lot of time on both sides of the coin with some of the some of the more darker

1:46:00

sides of this real estate uh proptech and then thank you for bringing forward the kind of um the topology of existing kind of

1:46:08

groups who are doing the abolitionist work as well

1:46:13

and and and and and i like the thank you for introducing me to that idea of of a abolitionist approach towards housing i

1:46:21

think that certainly i think that’s what the promise i think of this conversation does is that we’re now i think re-equalizing that power

1:46:28

relationship we are we’re trying to break out that kind of power asymmetries because i to be honest much of this much of this

1:46:35

type of information is available it’s just completely held in certain very

1:46:40

i think tightly held circles and it’s not going to be released um i think that there’s an article

1:46:45

this morning um talking about citizen researchers digging into the treasure trove of data that the

1:46:51

government of british columbia has now released but then of course uh the problem is that they it’s it’s five dollars a record so

1:46:57

really how much that how much has that really kind of helped in terms of its kind of levels of transparency but then i think that it is it is from

1:47:04

the grassroots that i think there is this type of opportunity to kind of level the playing field i think

1:47:09

that the growth in terms of i think a kind of community-based proptech in terms of monitoring

1:47:15

evictions in terms of understanding the role of displacement that i think that that that is i think part of that

1:47:21

type of condition and again that part of that and then kind of advancing that type of technology and

1:47:27

ensuring a level of openness and and i think of the availability i think that that

1:47:32

is i think one that leads one for a lot of optimism in this space but i’ll pass on to ian for his comments

1:47:39

yeah thank you um no i appreciate the question and yeah sorry to um i realized i did give

1:47:46

quite a uh dark overview here of the proptech landscape and um you know it’s uh it’s

1:47:53

i think that it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not all doom and gloom and that so much incredible work is being done both um

1:48:00

you know in terms of developing the technology and the at the sort of grassroots um analog

1:48:06

level around around this stuff but um but just kind of in response to jesse’s point here you know what kinds

1:48:13

of uh to spit it back what kinds of existing forms of decentralized living um you know how can

1:48:20

we reinforce that uh or how can we reinforce those through these platforms um you know one thing that

1:48:27

stuck out to me when i was listening to maxim’s presentation about this is is truly how

1:48:34

uh how the design and kind of philosophical approach to this

1:48:40

technology really informs what it ends up being and doing um you know so

1:48:46

so with with doma um we have this object of a collective ownership model that’s based on the blockchain and

1:48:54

in particular i wanna i wanna pull out this point of building equity right that’s something that that i’ve seen in

1:49:01

other proptech firms um you know proposed and as a model so i’ll

1:49:06

briefly share my screen just as i pulled this example up while i was um thinking about this um a company called

1:49:13

rove so this is a it’s a really interesting looking company i think that they might

1:49:18

have actually changed their business model a little bit since the last time i looked at them um you know but they at some point

1:49:26

had uh been giving renters a financial stake in their apartments as they as they said um through

1:49:32

something called a rentership model um now i think it’s important to highlight

1:49:38

though that this the conceptualizing rentership was always done under the rubric of

1:49:44

um of kind of participating in financial markets of uh of an investor mentality that’s uh

1:49:50

sort of available to everyone and every everybody it was never necessarily about um

1:49:58

you know ultimately the decommodification of housing or the definationalization of housing is an object of investment and i think that

1:50:04

that’s where we can start to see the distinctions between um some of these conventional proptech firms

1:50:10

uh and some of these abolitionist proptech firms um that do begin from the design stage

1:50:17

uh looking to looking to kind of disrupt not innovation but disrupt the system right

1:50:23

um so so hopefully that um that makes sense and i also just wanted to um make a quick note that i i didn’t see

1:50:31

jesse’s message until after uh i had finished speaking um but i was talking about zumper in section eight

1:50:36

which i failed to kind of contextualize but section 8 is a is a rental assistant

1:50:43

program rental assistance program in the u.s that basically pays landlords the difference

1:50:49

between uh between what low-income households can provide and and what the fair market

1:50:56

rent is um so so that’s the context for section eight and uh you know that um hopefully clarifies

1:51:03

maybe some questions around uh if people weren’t familiar yeah i i guess i’ll um

1:51:11

i i also had um just a couple of other thoughts about uh

1:51:16

about maxim’s talk here that uh that i think you

1:51:21

brought up an interesting point about the inability to own in places like vancouver um and it was pretty striking to see

1:51:29

that visualization of the the you know home prices i can’t remember at what point that kind of came in your uh came in

1:51:36

your talk but the visualization that where we can really see that it’s um that it’s so

1:51:41

out of reach right and and i think that andy brings a really important perspective

1:51:46

to this because you know what i’m talking about is this sort of institutional or corporate landlordism where you know my mind goes to

1:51:54

yeah you know the a lot of these homes that are that are unaffordable um and inaccessible to everyday people

1:52:01

even people who are relatively wealthy in housing markets like vancouver can’t afford um a lot of

1:52:06

a lot of these homes but um you know some of these hedge funds private equity firms real estate investment trusts

1:52:12

are very cash rich and are able to to kind of swoop in and buy these homes right now andy provides some

1:52:19

great framing around how there’s also this element of informality right um that that really characterizes

1:52:26

markets in a way that sometimes gets lost in conversations about corporate landlordism um

1:52:32

and you know it’s it’s it’s something that is uh

1:52:38

it’s important not to inflate it to be bigger than it really is you know in the u.s at

1:52:44

least corporate landlords i think only clock in for

1:52:49

a single digit percentage of all the rental housing you know it’s not huge by any means it’s growing and it’s

1:52:55

something to uh be aware of and address and think about in terms of its relationships to these markets and

1:53:01

these technologies but um i think again it’s a great point to highlight the informality that still characterizes

1:53:07

so much of these markets that’s great yeah i think the the the

1:53:12

renter’s registry would be an interesting thing to see how that would take off like in places like vancouver where we

1:53:18

could kind of start to connect the dots around that informality and would people be willing to kind of like self-report kind of what they’re

1:53:24

doing and their experiences are as renters and kind of see how that could go um actually

1:53:30

there’s a way of making it completely on completely having not a choice because there’s something called an rta one

1:53:36

agreement between a tenant and landlord any landlord and tenant have to fill that form so why

1:53:42

can’t you send a copy into the provincial government for records right i’m sorry i i i always like to

1:53:48

find you know opportunities where you kind of escape a level of

1:53:53

of of of transparency and uh and and try to establish that toll booth if you will

1:53:59

but um but that’s that’s that’s the interesting opportunity in this type of discussion um i think that it’s just really i think

1:54:06

really bringing in to a level like because there’s some benefits to that informality but then there’s also i think a certain level of cost in terms

1:54:13

of not being counted this entire informal rental marketplace is completely under counted in this in

1:54:20

the in the cmhc rental surveys like it’s it’s it’s they’re at best lucky to get the

1:54:26

condominium rentals but they don’t have really an understanding of what happens to these other types of rentals whether

1:54:34

they be single-family homes base basements or or or laneway homes that they’re that that

1:54:40

that is actually probably one of the kind of key policy challenges because we know that over the majority

1:54:46

of rental in places like the city of vancouver are in these informal relationships as opposed to the formal

1:54:53

ones great thank you yeah putting the pressure on from both sides getting the government asked within having the

1:55:00

people offer it up will show the landlords that there’s no you can’t hide this information anymore um totally maybe we could just switch

1:55:06

over we’ve got a question coming in from the audience so this is maybe one for morale and maximum to respond to but

1:55:12

it’s coming from ross gentlemen who’s our treasurer at 221a and was an advisor on his overall project

1:55:17

but he says tokenization is another form of financialization and in the doma model these instruments

1:55:23

may be securities and subject to related regulation does doma

1:55:28

financialization that gets residents to modestly participate as investors simply further

1:55:33

financialization will securities regulation be a barrier um and can tokens be sold amassed and

1:55:41

amassed to subvert democratic control within these kinds of platforms so yeah very good questions ross um and i

1:55:48

think in the blockchain space just as a caveat we can say that this is an ever fluid conversation about what is a

1:55:53

security and what is not and often things that are tokenized are deemed securities and then become

1:56:00

not securities or they are deemed not securities and then all of a sudden they become securities

1:56:05

um so like i said this is this is the acculturation moment for the technology but morale

1:56:11

maybe you could respond with some some of your work yeah i mean i think um i’ll pass it to

1:56:17

maxim in a moment here but um you know in terms of kind of it is another form of financialization um and

1:56:23

i think that’s a very astute comment um you know i can’t speak specifically to doma but um to your point jesse i think that notion

1:56:30

of kind of um you know if it’s a tuesday and the moon is waning then maybe it’s a security um

1:56:36

and then it is the next day um is one of the biggest it’s a very large

1:56:43

problem space um with any kind of tokenization i mean it seems very risky um obviously

1:56:50

for the kind of um the legal implications of the regulatory ones and i would imagine you know doma and

1:56:55

again i won’t speak for for the project but you one of the challenges that we see with any really

1:57:01

blockchain use case that attempts to kind of use networks that cross jurisdictions um is that the regulatory

1:57:07

obfuscation and like lack of existing regulations about how these operate how these technologies kind of

1:57:13

and these tokens operate and circulate across borders and where they become

1:57:20

codified for instance if there is a law that kind of indicates that in this particular jurisdiction this is how it

1:57:26

works um it is quite scary frankly um and you can see this even like at the

1:57:32

the most basic level of you know let’s say you wanna you have bitcoin you wanna sell in canada today

1:57:38

um the legal ramifications of having mined your own bitcoin or purchased it from um

1:57:44

you know uh let’s say local bitcoins or a third-party custodial exchange that’s essentially an unregulated bank

1:57:51

um over time has changed so significantly um and and has like it really is

1:57:57

um there’s a temporality there to think about um and that’s just one jurisdiction um that for instance if you’re to you

1:58:04

know mind your own bitcoin today and you have evidence of that um or that you mind bitcoin let’s say 10 years ago

1:58:10

um and you try to kind of liquidate that using fiat um that’s a very different tax implication

1:58:17

um than say having purchases from some shady you know dark web market um 10 years ago

1:58:24

and trying to kind of essentially um offload that right now to be able to kind of leverage that investment um so i think it’s a real big problem um

1:58:32

it’s really challenging to figure out there i think that informality of the market is something

1:58:37

that continues to persist um and i think the way that you know a lot of different

1:58:42

um initiatives and and tokens regardless of kind of the use case that underpins um the their existence um just

1:58:50

the way that it operates is that you just kind of you roll with the risk right and because that risk is always going to kind of um

1:58:56

hit the end user um so it’s really kind of an individualized experience so i think that’s probably

1:59:02

kind of one of the bigger issues um with regards to kind of that tokenization um and yeah it’s a real challenge

1:59:10

that said you know for a lot of people have big risk appetites it’s pretty enticing right because for

1:59:15

instance if you mentioned bitcoin 10 years ago um and you can find a way to to kind of translate into liquid forms

1:59:24

of capital if you will um let’s say fiat even if you pay capital gains taxes on it for instance

1:59:30

um or let’s say you didn’t mind it you purchased it um you’re still sitting on quite a bit of money right your return on investment is

1:59:36

so high and so i think that’s where it kind of becomes really slippery i guess maxim i don’t know if uh he

1:59:43

probably something much more coded to say it’s all passing no i mean i agree with what you just said and it i think it’s a very good question

1:59:50

and i i also wanted to thank you moral because your inside sometimes um you know they bring

1:59:58

a lot of interesting things to how we think about doma so it’s it’s nice to see that someone who’s trying to figure

2:00:04

out what we’re trying to do but uh for sure one of the main reasons

2:00:10

for you know us not pursuing like funding and going for

2:00:15

massive like uh trial of how this would work in real life is

2:00:20

because like the incentive is there then to try to compete and as soon as you’re in that

2:00:26

chase you’re you’re kind of ultimately not doing what we want to do right

2:00:31

so i mean that that’s a simple that’s a very simple answer to what some

2:00:38

of the things you were saying in the beginning but then the second of course even more

2:00:43

complicated question is then even in the ideal world where we would be able to design

2:00:49

um the kind of fractional ownership scheme in a way that would make sense

2:00:55

and you know like we would have some sort of frictionist assigned to these assets so they’re not

2:01:00

extremely like liquid and they traded and stuff like that uh it’s still a question of like who’s

2:01:07

in and who’s out how does this work on the city scale does it actually change things structurally

2:01:13

so that’s why we remain on this kind of layer with the help of 218 currently but

2:01:20

um this is one of the biggest questions that i’m interested to figure out because

2:01:25

i mean the the i think the only way to respond to that question is that sure like fractionalization in this kind

2:01:33

of disposition of nature is definitely going to even on

2:01:38

the short term it’s definitely going to lead to further financialization right

2:01:44

but then you get to see how like housing becomes this major how uh asset

2:01:50

class you know like most of economies have like around 50 percent of their gdp

2:01:55

being like assets and this like politically becomes impossible for

2:02:01

governments to think about like the financialization of housing right you have rents that are

2:02:07

relatively attached to incomes but still uh you know like depending on the situation depending on the context

2:02:15

in some places like berlin for instance like the ratio that people pay for rent

2:02:21

uh is growing and for kiev i’m not even saying because most of people we showed

2:02:28

are that mistakes because their figure is like 70 80 percent of of average income that is rent it’s just

2:02:35

unthinkable so uh yeah i mean i’m just i’m just saying this to say that you know

2:02:42

i mean if we know that rents are going to be this kind of struggle and i very

2:02:47

much like this idea of like city foreigners

2:02:53

and this is for sure an important battle to fight but then the other question is like what do we do

2:02:58

with the housing as asset class which has been accruing the its value

2:03:04

and yeah for us that we just are questioning whether fractionalizing it

2:03:09

and kind of thinking about like kind of making it something that belongs to commons

2:03:15

is a way and how is it possible to achieve that’s basically the kind of the long-term goals of the

2:03:21

project yeah go ahead andy of course

2:03:28

one of the i think biggest challenges in this conversation is the kind of role of financialization of

2:03:34

the financialization of residential real estate and i think that it’s important to actually acknowledge that the entire mortgage system that was

2:03:42

created especially after the second world war was in an attempt to ensure

2:03:47

a level of accessibility into home ownership and and security and tenure and i think

2:03:53

that this is actually what makes it so tough i mean um if you were if you’re in vancouver circa

2:03:59

1920s um not asian uh you could buy a place in vancouver but you’d have to buy a place

2:04:06

and buy property in vancouver again not being asian or women indigenous et cetera but and that and and actually

2:04:13

the fact that you’d have to provide uh one-third of the payment upfront one-third of the

2:04:19

payment six months later and complete the transaction in a full year so you’d have to pay off your entire property within one year

2:04:26

and i think that there were just iterations of that throughout the up until the second world war i think through which after the second world war

2:04:32

with the returning veterans of the uh of uh coming back to canada

2:04:38

um realizing hey i just fought for my fought and for a lot of my friends died for my country

2:04:43

i need a place to live with my family and want to continue on my life that mind you it’s interesting side note

2:04:48

uh the amount of protest movements that occurred which included the occupation of the bank of the hotel vancouver

2:04:54

that you see the creation of the what would be the contemporary mortgage system in canada now from that port moving

2:05:01

forward you see the you know the the kind of pathways through which kind of has kind

2:05:07

of created the actual hyper commodity hyper-commodified uh

2:05:12

residential real estate market that we see today but then just to kind of beginning to understand that the financialization

2:05:20

of residential real estate actually started i think in part as an attempt to ensure a level of

2:05:26

affordability and security in tenure so as a kind of lesson if you will almost a darth vader-esque arc

2:05:33

of this type of technology it’s where it begins with the best of intentions and yet here we are

2:05:42

great thanks um just a reminder to the audience if you have any questions please put them in the q a

2:05:48

window and we can bring you in them with a live voice or we’re happy to read out your question if you prefer to type it

2:05:54

for the panelist answer to just wondering if the panelists have

2:05:59

questions for each other anything coming to mind in your notes

2:06:14

i mean i have one comment i guess that a couple of times when other people were

2:06:20

speaking i thought of the fact that i missed it in my part of presentation

2:06:25

and it’s around this idea that also next to what i just described as the

2:06:30

kind of difficulty for uh for the project um

2:06:36

i guess one thing that is is really worth fighting for is still this kind of idea of this ideological

2:06:44

um kind of limitation of you know like how used we are to this idea of like on

2:06:50

one family one house situation like in especially in some

2:06:55

of the western kind of uh countries i mean that kind of situation

2:07:02

is is pretty difficult to to change and and this is where indeed maybe this

2:07:09

kind of extreme financialization and i mean for me it’s actually inspiring to see that people in vancouver

2:07:15

stop hoping for home right like because that means that vancouver is reaching this moment when

2:07:22

like it becomes obvious that something else needs to happen us so so what to say is that there’s this

2:07:29

cultural shift that seems to be really necessary to do and that’s where where we all kind of

2:07:36

invite you to the ranks of propaganda for alternatives and that’s why it’s good to have

2:07:41

these events uh simply because yes i it seems like there is the need to

2:07:48

at least be be able to talk up and imagine different different scenarios

2:07:55

yeah maybe that connects to ian brought in lauren berlant earlier but it could connect to her idea of like the cruel

2:08:01

optimism and kind of facing the reality of kind of what we have to do next um in terms of providing for ourselves

2:08:08

um but i think just to say also that on this front these are all kind of like ideas and and um and incredibly exciting kind of

2:08:16

like propositions for where we could go but there’s still a lot of work that needs to happen like this is on the

2:08:21

design side that we’re talking in terms of the design and the tech stack of what could happen but of course there’s a lot that needs

2:08:26

to happen in the legal stack um in the physical development stack of homes within the city for this all to

2:08:32

kind of converge into something that might be um healthier and more more cooperative

2:08:38

so yeah with that in mind i mean i think what i’m looking forward to in terms of

2:08:44

this future is these um i guess it goes back to our launch event that we had earlier in may

2:08:50

where svetlana metfienko from simon fraser’s um digital democracies institute joined

2:08:56

us but she was bringing forward these ideas of um of um benjamin bratton’s kind of bordering and

2:09:02

debordering of the state in terms of technology and so where like the the legal stack is shifting to

2:09:09

accommodate this form of work within within the property world um you know it’s to a benefit and it

2:09:15

could be a disadvantage again you have to use like really critical lenses to kind of see what’s going on but certain places can

2:09:22

can deregulate themselves to invite this technology to come in and go gangbusters um for instance this might be the like

2:09:29

in dubai they’ve put their entire property um registry on on the blockchain for good or for bad i

2:09:36

don’t know um country of georgia has done this as well of course they have a much shorter

2:09:41

history of property ownership so it might be an easy thing to do to try out and figure out what’s next certain american states are doing this

2:09:47

as well um so yeah these are kind of testing grounds and we’ve seen blockchain use kind of

2:09:53

deregulated spaces also in other contexts of its development such as refugee camps to test things out

2:10:00

where people don’t have as many rights to stand up for so i think you know when we see this starting to happen in places like vancouver we need

2:10:06

to start asking like how are these deregulations happening who’s pushing for them um and which

2:10:11

communities are you really consulting with before you kind of make these decisions as well right right

2:10:17

right but i think that matt maxine you’ve had re you really have hit i think a really interesting point is that

2:10:23

i think that there is now a tension in vancouver because now i think the idea of community verb

2:10:29

versus prop i think that that has now i think now really entered the type of lexicon in vancouver that i think is

2:10:35

offers that opening in terms of innovation and change um i just finished the study whereby we

2:10:40

found out that you know one in five property owners in vancouver own a second property so that that idea of a question of

2:10:47

justice a question of fairness at its very basic rousey and kind of levels

2:10:52

that that seems to be a bit of a challenge and a bit of a problem and i think that this is i think really that moment i think through which it offers

2:10:59

that opportunity at that opening and i think the the interesting thing is okay well how do we fill in that opening i think

2:11:04

you know whether how we fill this in with prop tech and as as as as an area you know that this this

2:11:10

kind of at least with that value of an abolitionist view towards property i think is exciting

2:11:15

i think the issue of kind of how it brings together i think this idea of of of this new idea of wealth i think

2:11:22

how do we how do we actually kind of rethink our ideas of wealth i think is that opportunity here

2:11:29

i think also though related to that you know this is um andy this really good point about kind of that tension between community um

2:11:35

and and essentially kind of property ownership um but i think especially like in places like vancouver and it’s a victoria’s

2:11:41

probably very similar in some ways um those are kind of um increasingly uh intention but also

2:11:48

working together right there we’re just essentially kind of becoming these walking contradictions where um you know the study just kind of mentioned of one in

2:11:54

five um property owners vancouver have a second house or second um piece of property that they own um i

2:12:00

would wager it’s probably not too different over here across the street um and you know i

2:12:06

think especially as those tensions of you know um uh trying to operate in cities as

2:12:11

renters and recognizing that perhaps it’s not you know at least at least in victoria it’s not a city for renters

2:12:16

in any way um that tension really kind of starts i think seeping into the cultural

2:12:24

consciousness and and moment um where you see people kind of really you know uh shifting their

2:12:30

politics for practical reasons um where all of a sudden people who you know perhaps to go back to this

2:12:37

conversation of kind of um the idealization of home right and i’m thinking of sophia nelson’s work on generation

2:12:44

share this idea that we all have this trajectory of housing that we have to follow and eventually get to the

2:12:49

single detached home um you know i think a lot of folks feel

2:12:54

that especially as renters um but as those pressures of how they begin to intensify and

2:13:03

amplify you know their lives change um especially you know um in in context geographical context where

2:13:08

there is no other option um you see those contradictions emerging really really starkly where all of a

2:13:14

sudden it would be interesting to see what those one in five um homeowners look like in terms of demographics um i wouldn’t be surprised

2:13:22

yeah i’d love to see it but um you know that old adage that we become what we

2:13:27

hate i think is something to keep in mind here right because um we’re just kind of walking

2:13:33

contradictions and those contradictions are definitely kind of apparent i think um as we kind of dig into that that informal component and also the

2:13:39

the kind of counter idealization of home and housing is something that must be kind of uh

2:13:45

defined in kind of more formal or traditional countless terms so it’s that would be a good study to look at

2:13:51

well it’s it’s funny because i i went into an essay with penny gerson over at ubc and

2:13:57

it actually was you know um can we just stop this paradigm of renters versus

2:14:02

owners and actually focus on what’s really important which is security a tenure and actually kind of pursue the idea of

2:14:08

security tenure over one’s lifespan and meeting the kind of suitability needs over one’s lifespan that i think

2:14:15

would really help us and i think that right now one of the kind of biggest housing kind of challenges in terms of how the

2:14:21

how the system is stuck a housing system is stuck is actually the fact that we’re now blessed or cursed with an extra 20

2:14:27

years of life um women an extra 25 years of wife men not so much got some bad news

2:14:33

but that i think that within that type of conversation is that we actually haven’t really formatted our system in terms of

2:14:39

that type of change so for like not only in addition to this role of technology but that for the various miracles and

2:14:46

the privileges of and you know mind you it’s not completely even across various demographic groups to begin with that

2:14:52

notation but then the idea that we don’t actually know because there’s so many of us now living

2:14:58

past you know age 70. what happens what’s our system in terms of having

2:15:05

that population not necessarily be living in exactly the same place as you did when you were 35

2:15:10

that is this incredibly ambiguous kind of environment but yet at the same time we all need that

2:15:17

security in tenure and i think that that’s really i think a big kind of and

2:15:22

and gray area um that i think that mind you at this uh mixed into all this

2:15:27

is i think some really interesting work in terms of the idea of tenure neutrality and how that i think is a avenue through

2:15:34

which i don’t think we’ve necessarily seen in north america it’s actually one that’s being pushed over in the scandinavian countries in terms of

2:15:40

tenure neutrality but yet we often revisit this idea of tenure neutrality and focus on

2:15:45

on security of tenure and an elect level tenure neutrality

2:15:52

okay um one more question coming in from ross gentlemen again um many of the ideas and platforms under

2:15:59

this discussion may be technology dependent but may not necessarily require

2:16:04

or benefit substantially from blockchain technology um distributed ledger technology is

2:16:09

another term for it um so what is the role for blockchain specifically within within these

2:16:16

platforms

2:16:24

gather their thoughts um i think you know it’s a really good point and um one of the things that i tell people

2:16:30

every day in my day-to-day job is um you don’t need a blockchain probably for

2:16:35

posting um and this spans across it’s not just um in terms of kind of uh the context that we’re talking about

2:16:41

today but i think just general use cases you know the the blockchain um as a universalizing

2:16:47

technology or dlts uh distributed ledger technologies um that umbrella of terms however you kind of define it

2:16:54

um in many ways and for most use cases i would argue is a solution looking for a problem um

2:17:01

that is often kind of um just the latest and and i think this is a very normal um

2:17:07

reality for for any kind of big systemic problem or even kind of policy problem where you don’t have

2:17:13

an answer and so you look for a quick solution and so this thing looks like it does all the things so let’s use it

2:17:19

um with i do think there might be a space though for um thinking critically about what

2:17:28

if you want to call it um specifically yes right um and and i think that’s kind

2:17:34

of the the big distinction for me um so you know um very bizarrely perhaps

2:17:41

i think bitcoin’s great um as a concept right i mean i think it’s good a very elegant idea um

2:17:47

poorly implemented um and scales horribly um and has some real practical limitations to

2:17:53

it but the notion of kind of what it’s trying to solve and why it goes back to that design question um

2:17:58

it does make sense to some extent um and so i’d argue that you know there might be some space for instance um especially thinking

2:18:05

about the context of 221a and the work you do to think very critically about tokenization and what it affords you and

2:18:11

whether or not to i think maxim’s point earlier um you know the the ideological kind of positionings that we’re trying

2:18:17

to operate from and what we’re trying to accomplish um that might be one entry point into a

2:18:22

solution um but this notion that like it has to be on a blockchain or even to your point jesse at the top of the panel

2:18:28

um that you know just blockchain in the what was it business in the front blockchain in the back um i think it’s it’s a big distractor

2:18:36

um and it’s if if people lead with that it’s usually a bit of a red flag in my

2:18:41

opinion yeah i can say quite honestly at first

2:18:47

it was um i mean it was sort of a getaway to think about these things like you know

2:18:52

it was like this kind of moment that enables you to think about what is actually possible um

2:18:59

and you know i know a lot of people who come from that kind of space back in like 2016

2:19:07

uh thinking about those things and of course like everything that we’ve shown so far

2:19:13

and everything that we prototyped you don’t need blockchain to build but at the same time there are certain

2:19:19

concepts like for instance again nfts that you know we were kind of considering as a

2:19:24

kind of way to have like property specific uh like assets and stuff like that

2:19:33

but you get just can see how they become normalized how they kind of enter general kind of

2:19:40

like people are also getting used to them therefore they are a bit less um exclusive and it’s certainly

2:19:47

interesting to see how the space evolves um but for sure like if you if if someone

2:19:53

tells you that this is absolutely impossible without blockchain and that it’s like the kind of cure follow our problem that’s

2:20:01

that’s definitely sounds suspicious

2:20:08

great um were there any more questions coming from the panelists for each other

2:20:16

well maybe we could leave it there for today and the conversation can continue um so email us if you have any questions

2:20:22

we’re happy to put you in touch with some of the panelists maybe if you’re interested in their work um i

2:20:28

just wanted to share my stream before um we sign off here one moment

2:20:34

great so um this we’re almost at the end of our launch series for the blockchains and conventional padlocks um

2:20:41

series uh so we have one final event which isn’t going to be a live one but something we’ve already recorded and

2:20:46

we’re looking forward to sharing with you next week on friday um the edit should be finished but it’s a round table where

2:20:52

we talked with a bunch of groups developing social tokens and um and distributed autonomous organizations where that

2:20:59

question of what blockchain could be used for um is is is very important um

2:21:05

so if you want to sign up to our mailing list um that’s something you could do to receive that or um just stay tuned and visit our

2:21:12

website at 221a.ca and you could find that um video coming

2:21:17

out next week so thank you morale thank you andy thank you ian

2:21:23

thank you maxine for all of your time and all of the work that you’ve put together um and i look forward to seeing how this

2:21:28

conversation might inform your future work we might be able to collaborate together so thank you so

2:21:34

much and um have a lovely day thank you thank you folks thanks again

2:21:39

take care ciao bye-bye

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