The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon December 19th, 2008

Ok, the first thing we’re going to do this week is buy some rice.  Why, you ask?  Because rice has the function of being hypo-allergenic – according to the International Rice Research Institute, it is not possible to have a true allergy to rice – although there are a very few people who have rice intolerances.  But generally speaking, if you store rice in your food storage, everyone will be able to eat it.  This is especially important if you imagine having babies, or ill people – you want easy to digest, and there’s nothing easier to digest than rice. 

A large chunk of the world’s population relies on rice as a staple food, and rice recipes have evolved all over the world – if there’s one thing you can be sure of it is that peasant rice based-cuisines are pretty well developed. 

Now the first and most important thing that I can say is that you have to understand that Brown Rice *IS NOT* actually a whole grain.  You see, when rice comes from the plant, it has a fairly heavy, not real digestible hull on it.  Brown rice is rice with the hull removed, exposing the germ to air.  And when the germs of grains are exposed to air, they oxidize.  So while whole wheat will keep nearly forever, brown rice has a very short lifespan – under a year. 

 Now whenever I say this people note that they’ve eaten brown rice that they’ve stored for several years, maybe it tasted a little stale, but it was fine.  But the problem is that what happens to brown rice isn’t that it gets stale – the oils in the grain go rancid.  And rancid oils are link to various cancers, particularly stomach cancer.  Not to mention that your body won’t get much nutritional value from a food with rancid oil in it, and it can upset stomachs as well. 

People’s ability to taste rancidity varies quite a bit – some people can’t taste it at all, some people can’t taste it until the grain is extremely rancid.  It is very hard to know objectively how good your tasting skills are.  So it is better to be safe than sorry on this subject, and I recommend storing no more than 6 months of brown rice at a time – you could probably go a little longer if you were buying right after the harvest, from an asian grocery store with a quick turnover, but 6 months is probably safest. 

That means if  you want to store more rice than you will eat in six months, you need to store white rice (there is actually a way to store unhulled rice, but I’ll get back into that some other time, or you can look through my old posts on storing grain – this is a quickie, and the answer is complex). This is unfortunate, because white grains are not as tasty or nutritious as whole grains.  That said, however, if you are storing a variety of grains and foods, some white rice will not be a problem.  White rice is just about the only white food my family does store.

Americans tend to see rice pretty much as rice, while in the rest of the world, people enjoy a huge range of flavors, scents and textures in their rice.  My suggestion is that if you don’t live near a place where rice is grown, and must rely on distant rice, you might try an Asian grocer, where a huge variety of rices, all smelling and tasting different, and many with different textures are available, and most will be available in 25lb bags (a Vietnamese friend of mine observes that this is not because his family stores food, but because his family can go through a 25lb bag of rice like lightning – make it the base of every meal, and you’ll see how fast it disappears).

 Generally speaking, typical American rice is long grain rice.  To me, supermarket long grain tastes extremely bland, but it has the characteristic of seperateness and dryness that many Americans like.  Jasmine and basmati rice are both scented rices that improve considerably over basic long grain.  Short grain rices like Arborio or Sushi have a lot of starch and produce a different texture when cooked – they are good for making rice balls or creamy textures.  Sticky rice is something entirely else, a delicious, almost sweet rice with a fascinating texture – it is usually cooked by steaming and we adore it. 

Ok, rice is a fairly bland food – whatever you eat with it, you’ll want to be fairly highly seasoned to provide contrast.  And highly seasoned means a good supply of spices.  If you’ve been contaminated by the idea that spices are doled out mostly by the pinch or 1/8 teaspoon, you may not think you need a lot of spices.  But to me, the secret of good  cooking is seasoning well – and with a fairly liberal hand.  I have no idea why most recipes are so parsimonious with the ingredients that give flavor.

You can probably grow most of your own herbs almost everywhere – either keep some fresh inside or dry your own.  But unless you live in a tropical climate suited to it, you’ll probably need to buy imported spices.  This is not a problem, as long as you can buy fair traded spices whenever possible.  Because spices are dry and even people who cook like I do use only comparatively small quantities, spices are a superb trade item, and a great way for the Global South to connect with the Global North. 

Whole spices keep much longer than ground ones – if you plan to store for a long time, you probably want to grind your own.  You can buy spice grinders, use a mortar and pestle, or, assuming you’ve got power, a small coffee grinder (don’t grind your coffee in it, unless you want it to taste strongly of whatever spice you ground last).  We buy nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, tumeric, ginger and a host of others as whole spices and grind them at need.  You can usually get good deals on bulk whole spices at whole foods and various internet sites.  Ground spices are convenient, but don’t last much longer than a year – and they last best if kept tightly sealed, cool and away from light and the stove.  Me, I’m just not doing without cinnamon sticks for my cinnamon-hot chocolate or vindaloo.

 Finally, I’ve mentioned lighting before, but I think the recent ice storm may be a good reason to remind people that you need a lot of flashlights, solar lanterns or oil lamps to survive an extended power outage.  Now is the time to stock up.

And if you are stocking up, and you don’t mind spending a little extra for a good cause, this is pretty wonderful https://www.bogolight.com/Articles.asp?ID=136

- spend $49 for a heavy duty solar powered light, and they will not only send one to you, but send one to a poor village in Africa, or a charitable program that needs basic lighting.  These are large enough and sturdy enough to light public areas - so they’ll work for your neighborhood blackout barbecue – and to help areas that have minimal lighting get enough.  I am definitely going to be acquiring one!   They allow you to choose between many areas of the world and charitable programs to make your donation. 

Cheers,

 Sharon

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Sharon December 18th, 2008

Don’t ever doubt the power of just one mind.
Or the world-wide power of just one rhyme.
Don’t ever doubt the force of the bassline.
Or a record gone round to burn the house down.You got to let go of remote control!  You got to let go of remote control!You got to let go of remote control!  You got to let go of remote control!

- Michael Franti and Spearhead

(Ok, you don’t have to or anything, but I’d strongly recommend that you listen to the song while you are reading this blog post – sometimes things just need the soundtrack.  This is one of them – you can see it on youtube actually: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywP_XVbvtCc and the song is downloadable in various places. We need the sound to go with the ideas here, and who better than Franti?)

Ok, folks, time for our wake up calls!  Today is the end of the year preparedness wrap up.  This is not your normal blog post, this a party, and like all the best parties it has a soundtrack, some singing and dancing, some call and response.  Because this is the year that normal started to go to hell, and we got our wake-up call!  But that doesn’t have to be bad news – knowing that we have to be responsible, that our future is in our hands can be empowering too.  Time to let go of the remote control, to let go of all the things we let operate on remote control, and time to take charge of our futures.  We got to put up a fight on this one – we’re not going gently into any kind of night.

Who’s out there now?  How many of you got your wake up call this year that we can’t count on everything working the way it always has? By my count there were 14 states that had a significant portion of their population lose power for more than a day or so: Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire (some of y’all are just logging back on), Texas, Indiana, Iowa Minnesota, Michegan, Ohio, Alaska.  I’m probably underestimating the number, too.  Ok, report, who am I missing??  What was it like?  Were you ready – would you have been ready if it lasted longer?

What about the places where a large number of people had to grab their bug out bags and run?  Iowa, right, and Minnesota, Californians from the Wildfires, and Lousianans and Texans from the Hurricanes.  Name your states, folks!  Call out loud!  Did your plan help you?  What will you do next time?

And time to sing out, all those folks who weren’t part of any official disaster, but feel like they got hit by an earthquake anyway – you lost your jobs, you lost your homes, you are still sitting in your homes, but what you had ain’t worth nothing and you know that all the things you assumed would keep you secure, well, they aren’t so solid anymore.  Time to find some small measure of security in all this bad.  What can you do now to insulate yourself from the next little earthquake?

What about the 1 in 5 Americans who ended last winter in debt to their utility companies, struggling to pay for increasingly unaffordable heat, light and power?  One out of every 20 Americans got shut off last year – that’s more than five million households who had to live without a major utility! Anyone want to bet that number won’t go up?  Can you manage without them?  We’ve got to get the coal fired electric plants closed down – are you ready to make do with less energy?

And yes this was a rough year for America, but it certainly isn’t just America.  Check in, all of you from the 91 countries that the CIA notes had serious shortages of oil, gas or electricity.  What about the victims of floods in Britain, riots in Greece, the Earthquake in China, or any of the other disasters that hit around the world?  Anyone here reading from those places?  Don’t stay silent!  Sing out and tell us how you do, how you did, and what you’ll do next time.

Ok, so you survived.  How’d it go?  Were you safe, were you strong?  So you made it through - were you ok, were you ready?  What did you learn in your trials this time – what will you change for the next time?

 What about those of you who had no trials - do you think you won’t ever?  Time to practice, because three days without power will teach you more about what you need to get along than all the reading you can do on the internet.   

All of us who had our wake-up calls, either because our basic systems failed, or because we saw our neighbors lose theirs - it isn’t just enough to shrug and go on – it is time to resolve that next time you’ll be ready, you won’t be stuck, you won’t be powerless, just because you are without grid power.  There isn’t any getting off easy in this life, unless you are rich – and most of us will never be that. 

 Do you have an evacuation plan, a bug out bag, a little cash in reserve and enough gas to get where you need to go?  Do you have a way of finding your loved ones if you have to get out? 

 Are you set with light, heat, cooking and anything else you need to be secure and comfortable at home in a power outage?  Don’t rely solely on a generator – getting gas out of the ground takes power, and widespread enough outage will mean you still need those no-power backup systems.

Are you talking to your neighbors, talking about how to manage systemic problems?  How will you deal with waste, with food, with the elderly and ill in the neighborhood?  

Most of all, are you set to take care of yourself and your own needs, maybe to help others, or are you likely to rely on safety nets?  There’s no shame in relying on a safety if you really need it – but I think there is some shame in making use of a safety net you could have avoided requiring.  The safety nets are most likely to catch those who need it if those of us who can take care of ourselves as much as possible. 

 It is so easy to live in the world and trust that the systems will keep you going on remote control, that it is enough to do nothing, or maybe to do a little.  But if you haven’t had your wakeup call, it is coming.  We have no choice but to let go of the remote control, to take responsibility for ourselves and our future.

What will you do this year to be more prepared? Remember, there’s no getting out of it – we’ve all got to put up a fight, because no one is going to make it easy for us.

Sharon 

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Sharon December 18th, 2008

Yup, another rerun, but this is one of my all-time favorite posts. I thought about editing the parts that reflect badly on me, but those are the funniest bits, as usual, so I just left them in.  I had so much fun writing this – and Edson helpfully points out that Obama, whatever his limitations, is clearly on the pie platform too – he’s a big fan.  So that can only be good .

The other day I got embroiled on a newsgroup in one of those endless discussions/debates/headbangings about what the best approach to greening the planet is. Of course, all of you know that my defining characteristics are my reasonableness, aversion to confrontation and sensitivity, so my role here was to calm the hot tempers and settle the differences of others, which I do from my sheer love of humanity. I provided a calm and rational perspective that I know helped settle everything right down, because that’s just the kind of healing, caring person I am.

Ok, just on the off chance that anyone involved in that group says otherwise, I want ask you upfront, who will you believe – them or me? After all, the people saying I was fanning the flames of this stupid umm…integral argument are nothing more than two or three hundred ordinary voices, where as I am a professional idio…author. I daily produce hundreds of words that are pulled randomly out of my a…er…finely crafted and honed for maximum effect. Sometimes the words even make sentences. Once in a while even grammatical sentences. These words are read by as many as eight or nine people around the world every single day. So you can certainly imagine that my ravings…um wisdom should outrank the sworn testimony of several hundred people.

So you’ll be proud to know that I, of course, natural leader that I am, did come up with a healing solution, something that we could come together on, a real commitment to change, a possible solution to the profound difficulties wrought upon us by the Great Change that comes sweeping over the (ok, stupid metaphor deleted)… But I did have an idea.

The idea was pie. And my position is that I’m for it. I know this is just the kind of hard-edged, radical position taking that you can expect on this blog, the reason you know you can turn here first to hear opinions that are beholden to no one…except the guy up the road with the cherry trees, who I can’t afford to piss off if I want pie. But this kind of risky political statement in favor of pie is just the sort of thing I know you’ll wish to support by donating a large portion of your salary to keep me going. Just click on the button below that says “big heaping wads of cash.”

I’m in favor of pie. I mean, what could be better than pie? It is commonly associated with good, noble things like motherhood, America, light bondage and domination, clowns and the federal reserve, so how could we not be for pie? In fact, who isn’t for pie? Well…

I have to tell you the ugly truth. There are powerful anti-pie interests in our government, and people working night and day to restrict your pie access. But we here at Casaubons book (Who is “we” you ask in puzzlement? Well, Sharon has obviously gone off the deep end writing her book, as you can tell from this post, so mostly the voices in her head. But they sometimes wear cool hats, and one of them is named “Leo.”) are committed to bringing you the truth about pie access and other equally crucial issues, like socks and beer.

It occurred to me, as I was healing the rift in this newsgroup brought on by unnamed troublemakers not named Sharon, that pie can do a great deal to heal our environmental crisis. For example, today’s climate change and peak oil news was particularly awful. There’s the coal, the war, the monks in Burma. There’s the fact that even if we halved our emissions, global warming will keep going for 600 years http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44719/story.htm . There’s the mass extinctions. The fact that one of the few bits of environmental good news, the reforestation of the east is threatened by us: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/07rCOVER.html?_r=1&ref=nyregionspecial2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin And then there’s the financial news…

All in all, I think the only possible reaction (other than hysterical weeping) to all this bad news on a cold, snowy afternoon is to put on fuzzy pajamas, bunny slippers and eat half a pie. Or to drink a lot of local beer, I guess. Heck, you could drink beer and eat pie together.

Yes, I know that’s pathological of me, but sometimes a retreat into pathology is rather comforting. I doubt I’m the only person who has ever responded to the bad news about our environment by thinking “apple or pumpkin?” The reality is whether we believe in stockpiling ammo or creating sustainable ecovillages, the need to derive comfort where we can is our common ground.

Pie can bring us together. And that unifying power isn’t limited to the peak oil movement – pie can cross religious, cultural and national boundaries. While there may be deep cultural divisions between those who believe that you should make your sweetened orange vegetable pies with sweet potatoes and those who vote for pumpkin, I believe these barriers can be crossed, if only we’ll just take a piece of each with a lot of whipped cream.

Pie can be a powerful political motivator as well. Right now, money tends to be the most powerful tool in politics, but let us not underestimate the influence of pie. Pies in the face are a powerful tool of political resistance in Europe. I’ve heard rumors that Bill Clinton sent the Haitians back because the republicans offered him all the blueberry pies he wanted. Dick Cheney regularly sits around nude, plotting his attacks on Middle Eastern countries while eating entire mince pies.   

This kind of inside information isn’t easy to come by – the author had to send several pies to congressional aides. Fortunately, they are sleep deprived, wired on coffee and often morally bankrupt so bribing them with pie is very easy.

But pie is also essentially, deeply democratic. Pie is an essential ingredient in town-meeting style democracy in many New England states, along with baked beans. And pie is about democracy – fundamentally, pie (and pasties, empanadas, dumplings, wontons and all the other pie relatives) are about stretching high value foods to share with everyone. If you have six apples and ten guests, someone gets screwed, unless you put them between two crusts with some spices and call it pie – everyone gets a piece of sweet apple, everyone gets some crust. Pies are a way of getting maximum enjoyment from high-value foods. Meat, fruit, spices – these things are special. But they can be enjoyed regularly if carefully combined with filling starches. They are about democracy, frugality, comfort and family.

And pies are things that you have to produce either for yourself or in your locality. The truth is that frozen pie crust tastes awful, and that Sara Lee pies taste like corn syrup, which is what they are mostly made from. Real pie – good pie comes either out of your kitchen or a local bakery or diner where they make it fresh every single day from real ingredients. Pies are part of a whole lifestyle – if you want to eat pie, you have to cook, or you have to have a little Mom and Pop bakery. And those things are democratic too – as opposed to corporatist.

Sure, you say, but if I eat too much pie, I’ll get fat. And lord knows, that’s a real possibility. But here’s the thing. How many of you have ever met a really fat Amishman? I haven’t. And they eat pie more or less constantly, or so my Amish neighbors tell me.

Pie can power a human-powered lifestyle in the way that junky processed crap can’t. Certainly the Amish cookbooks I’ve seen are filled with pies. And back when dessert (or breakfast in New England) was routinely pie, people were a lot thinner. One might argue that pie isn’t what makes you fat – it is not living the pie lifestyle. Because the pie lifestyle means picking berries or walking to the bakery. It means eating pie as a treat, and as the place where you put your special festival foods that you don’t have all the time, while most of you meals are simple.

Instead, for most Americans, breakfasts is false pie - poptarts, which despite a plastic resemblance are not pies at all – because they aren’t actually food. The poptart lifestyle makes you fat, the pie lifestyle makes you thin, or thinner.

Pie makes you thin. It brings about democracy. It brings about agrarian or relocalized societies and economies. It provides comfort, crossing political lines. People talk about oil as the “master resource” but perhaps we need to start reconsidering the power of pie to create a sustainable, human powered economy. Pie-centered societies, ones that provide a chicken in every pot pie, are what we’re striving for. We can all consume less, and still have an evenly distributed piece of the pie.

Which is why I must say to you with a heavy heart – we are facing peak pie. Corporate interventions, and the “better than homemade” slogan has resulted in a US population that mostly doesn’t know how to cook anymore. Millions of people think that pumpkin comes from a can. Farmers are still going out of business at an appalling rate. The majority of our pie ingredients are contaminated by pesticides. Our ability to provide for our pie needs is deeply threatened. We are facing the final destruction of the pie lifestyle – and the end of the last remnents of our democracy.

So what can we do about it? How can we fight back for the pie lifestyle, for Mom, Teddy Bears and Apple (or Peach) pie? The only way to deal with this depletion crisis is to start living the pie lifestyle. Bake a pie today from locally grown ingredients. Eat a pie today, and use it to fuel human powered activity – dump your leaf blower and get out a rake, get rid of the power mower and bring out the push mower, lose the chainsaw and get the bucksaw down.

Make a pie and give it to a neighbor. Give out the recipe. Get together and make pies for elderly shut ins or the school bake sale or to buy solar lighting for the neighborhood watch. Throw a pie at a warmonger – we’ll have a bake sale to raise your bail. Point to the coal plant builders and the energy wasters and tell people – they are against pie! Start “Pie Eating Veterans for the Truth” and tar polluters and heavy emitters with the scorned label “pie haters.” Don’t forget to mention that they don’t like mothers, babies or kittens either. Have a town meeting and hand out pie. Give out pie at the voting booths, to hungry people in the park, to the shelter and soup kitchen. Try pies from other places, other lands – and send the money you would have spent on poptarts to good causes. When the world seems to suck, eat pie, and use that energy to get back on your feet and fight again.

Fight now, for motherhood, justice and apple pie!

Shalom,

Sharon

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Sharon December 17th, 2008

So Tom Vilsack is going to be Secretary of Agriculture, hmmm… Let’s see, rabid ethanol proponent…check!  Enthusiastic supporter of GMOs and biotechnologies…check!  Totally indebted to and under the thumb of agribusiness…check!  Yup, it seems clear that Obama really took Michael Pollan’s “Farmer in Chief” piece to heart ;-P.  Short of actually appointing, say, Monsanto’s chairman, it is hard to imagine a choice less likely to make real shifts in our food system. 

But of course, as Rod Dreher points out (quite correctly) and as Carolyn Baker points out (equally correctly), so far there’s very little from the Obama administration that should make us feel secure that what’s coming is going to shift the status quo.  Ultimately, Hillary, Geithner and the rest of the crew mostly can be described as people who did things not as badly as George W. Bush and his primary appointees – but that’s hardly saying anything of note.

I was in college when Bill Clinton was elected president, and I was almost alone in my social circle in refusing to volunteer for him – I’d supported a more leftist candidate in the primaries, and despite my acute desire to believe that Clinton would offer some kind of radical change, I couldn’t quite shake the reality of his positions out of my thinking.  The same is true of Obama, who, for example, wrote of dealing with the mortgage crisis in terms of the moral hazard of bailing out homeowners – but appears to have few qualms about bailing out banks.

 I had precisely the same feeling during this campaign – I preferred Obama quite dramatically to Hillary Clinton, and there were genuinely moments of hopefulness in his campaign.  But I kept thinking, riffing on the late, great Molly Ivins, that you have to dance with them that brung you.  That is, Obama couldn’t possibly come to power without indebting himself to people who are more invested in the status quo than in improving lives.

In order to be the president many of us hoped Obama would be, he would have to be willing to betray many of the people who brought him, and their hopes and investments in his future.  This is no easy feat for anyone, and is probably less so for someone who came so far, so fast, with the hand of so many.  It isn’t impossible – other presidents have done it. The man isn’t even president yet.

But presidents are known by the company they keep – the reality is that no man can supervise all the elements of the nation alone – they depend enormously on those people that Obama is appointing right now.  He will not be out in the fields, or at the soup kitchens – he will rely on reports and summaries from those he appoints. And those summaries will be given by men whose viewpoints are already formed.  Vilsack cannot but describe our food system through the lens of his prior investments, and this will be disastrous.

In 2002, the Atlantic ran a story by Mark Bowden called “Tales of the Tyrant” – it described what it was like to be a dictator, and imagined how Saddam Hussein’s situation must lead inevitably to his downfall.  The deepest reason, Bowden argued, was that everyone lied to the dictator all the time – they couldn’t do anything else.

I’ve thought of that story a number of times in relationship to various presidencies.  It is true that our presidents don’t routinely throw advisors who tell unpleasant truths into jail – but even the best of them are surrounded, not so much by people who lie all the time, but by people who tell their truth as though it were “the” truth.  To some degree, of course, this is inevitable – everyone’s worldview is shaped by their experiences.  But it is possible to bring in a diversity of viewpoints, to find, in multiple versions of the truth, something closer to reality.  Obama has overwhelmingly chosen one, very narrow set of viewpoints – the viewpoints of people who have power now, and to whom he is already indebted for his power.

I don’t claim that there is no hope for Obama, but before he chose these people to surround him, there was hope that an ordinary man of integrity, hearing a range of viewpoints, might choose something different.  Now, we have to imagine that Obama is an extraordinary man, one with the power to find unconventional paths to knowledge, and the willingness to override the viewpoints he has invested himself in.  It gets harder to hope for change.

Sharon

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Sharon December 16th, 2008

Yesterday’s big news included the fact that Americans lost two trillion dollars in housing wealth last year.  That’s one heck of a big number – except that like most of the big numbers we actually see in the news these days, it radically understates the reality.

You see 2 trillion is just the amount that they claim you could have sold your house for in 2007 vs. 2008.  But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.  Because, of course, this assumes that most of us could access the value of our homes if we wanted to.  But for many people, that’s no longer possible at all.

For example, for many thousands of people who plan to stay in their homes and  would like to access the equity in their homes through home equity lines have seen them revoked.  Millions of people cannot sell their homes at any price, because they are now underwater, and the banks will not permit a short sale, or because they can’t afford to lose their downpayment, but can afford to keep paying the mortgage.  Still more simply could not sell their homes at any price they are willing to accept, because nothing at all is selling, and they cannot find a buyer who can get credit.  The functional value of many homes in the US is very low or negative – that is, the house will continue to cost you mortgage payments and taxes, but you cannot functionally extract any value from them.  Realistically, many, many trillions are now tied up in housing as functionally “lost” value.

For many aging folks who had relied on their housing as an “investment,” and for the many elderly who had most of their wealth tied up in their houses, they will find that not only can they not cash out, they may no longer be able to trade their housing for care in their old age – assisted living depends on high valuation of homes – right now, it seems that few companies wish to take this in trade.  

Is the whole story of home ownership unremittingly bleak, however?  If you are underwater, is that the end of home ownership for you?  My own take is that it isn’t, that there are several ways to shift the economic situation so that homes move from the debit column to the asset column. 

The first is to shift your thinking.  Until not too long ago, people rarely thought of their homes,  primarily as assets.  Your home is, well, your home.  Its value lies not in its potential sale price, or your ability to trade it for something, its value lies in its function.  Now only you can evaluate whether you will be paying too high a price for that home – and this is something we all need to think through.  But if your house is worth the price to you, too tight a focus on its “official” value distracts from the reality – one’s home is one’s home.

But that’s not all there is to it.  Right now most of us with mortgages are pouring money into our houses.  None of us can afford a money pit right now – we might as well at least pay rent, and receive basic services and allow others to take the economic risk and make the repairs if we are simply going to pay out (please do not mistake me, I don’t think renting is a bad idea, in fact – but this post my primary focus is on the present homeowning majority).  So your house has to not just shelter you, but either help you produce money or enable you to reduce other costs.

That means that you need to evaluate your home for what else it can do for you.  Can you grow a garden, and reduce food costs?  Plant fruit trees, nuts and berries?  Raise chickens, rabbits or bees to provide food and fertility?  Raise larger livestock?  Produce some of your home heating or cooking energy in the form of anything from coppiced firewood to twigs and dried grasses for a tiny hot rocket fire to stir fry over?

Could extra rooms in your home enable you to produce additional income or reduce total costs.  Could you rent out a room, make an apartment and rent that, or take in a housemate?  Could you consolidate with your family or with friends? Do you really need all the space you have?

Do you have a workshop that would enable you to do home repairs, fix your own appliances and otherwise cut back on new purchases and hired labor (you may have already done this, but if you don’t, it is time?). Do you have the equipment to mend and repair your own clothing, rather than replace it, or perhaps even make new? 

Could any of these things (or something else) be adapted into an income stream?  That is can you make, build, repair, mend, cook, tend or do something else that is needed in your neighborhood?   There are hundreds of small businesses that can be run from your home part time – everything from small scale programming to selling bulk foods, from daycare to mending and handyman work.  These have the dual effect of offering you an economic fallback position, making your home into an asset (and potentially reducing your tax burden in some cases), and also by engaging with the people immediately around you, improving local economies and communities.

Suburban and rural garages and barns offer the possibility of even more than cottage industry – a business that might eventually employ others in your neighborhood.  Think about what you depend on, and what will be needed in your community - is it possible that your garage might be the new general store?  That your small greenhouse operation might employ your neighbors eventually?  That yours might be the neighborhood bakery or restaurant?  Those of us who live in areas away from commerce might start thinking in terms of establishing local businesses – these may need to stay under the table until enforcement of restrictive regulations is reduced – that is, you might start baking for a couple of neighbors by barter, while also gradually working on finding the equipment to expand eventually.

What about community as an asset.  If you stay put in a place where you have ties (and this presumes we have done the work of making those ties), can they provide a measure of security, of safety, of assistance that we once relied on economic assets for – that is, the neighbors who watch out for you, who help out during illness, who will work with you, who send over a pot of soup when they have extras – those are assets of economic value as well, and must be considered in the calculation.  Staying put can enable us to keep those assets in place.

In many cases, if you are committed to keeping your home – because it is near your family, because it has an ideal yard to grow food in, because you are tied to your community – you will need several of these strategies.  And they may be hard to enact at first – for example, it may be hard to decided who gets to keep their house when the need for family consolidation comes up. Who moves in with who, and how do we protect the interests of those who don’t own?  How do we handle multiple parties working out of the same house?  How do we get used to less privacy and less personal space? 

The other calculation we need to make is the truly long term value of these homes.  Wealth in the US  is disproportionally concentrated in the hands of older people – high housing prices and rapidly inflating educational costs along with stagnant real wages mean that those who bought into markets decades ago got most of the actual wealth.  Older people and younger ones have a shared crisis – the elderly and aging baby boomers who relied on financial investments and housing to ensure security in their old age no longer can rely on either of those things.  Younger people who couldn’t get into the markets, or couldn’t do it without extortionate rates and minimal downpayments have either had no opportunity to own a house or will lose that option rapidly.  So we have older folks with houses, but with declining investment income and a declining number of years of employment, and younger people who can work, but who can’t get into the housing market, who can’t afford a mortgage and who soon, by defaulting on student loans and mortgages, won’t be able to for a long time.

You may not be able to trade a house for assisted living anymore, but you might be able to trade a future in your home for help in your old age – it might be as bluntly mercenary as that, but in most cases, it won’t be, it will be a familial relationship.   But aging baby boomers and the elderly in the US are facing an economic crisis – and they are going to have to start thinking of their homes as a long term asset to be passed down to children and grandchildren – and those children are going to have to start seeing themselves as stewards of a resource, the people who care for the family home, so that their own posterity can inherit it, and who in turn, care for their own parents and relations so that someone will do the same for them.

The shift of housing from a salable asset to something worth holding, a source of income and reduced costs, the place where you live out your life, and the place where your children grow up, come to adulthood, and come home to is going to be the great psychological and economic shift of our times, I suspect.  And any calculation of the value of our homes must begin from this complex question of what our homes are worth – as I say above, I think many of us will find that the answer is both less and more than we ever expected.

Sharon

• adapting in place , home
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