Bartertowne, Quillages

@El_Stone

I have looked into what you mentioned, Bartertowne. I find the Quillage idea intriguing, but not so much the Bartertowne project near Grafton. I’m not a young buck, so interested in the free-love scene. I’m married with children, and Christian; so I’d prefer a more traditional arrangement than what Bartertowne appears to be.

That said, the idea of a little intentional community of tiny houses on skids or wheels is intriguing to myself. It sounds very similar to what Paul Wheaton (of Wheaton Labs in Montana) did with his “Roots” programs. In his case, the Roots & Deep Roots programs would offer either an acre or two acres of long term leased land, and the leased land would be measured as a radius from a driven post. 117 feet or 168 feet, respectively. So all the leased “lots” are circular, and the area not within a leased circle is the commons; makes any dispute about who decides where the ‘property line’ is rather easy to demonstrate without a survey, as only a 200 foot tape measure is required to determine the facts. The use of the central post also makes a convenient place to locate the electric “service” and perhaps a mailbox.

And another thing that Paul does is encourage everyone to do their own thing, but that small buildings on skids (in Montana) are considered temporary structures, and are exempt from real estate taxation, zoning & permitting. How would this work in NH? Is a tiny home on skids, or wheels, exempt from property taxes? Or would a license plate mounted on the “back” (as would be expected on a trailer intended to use the federal highway) be required, and then it would be taxed as a motor vehicle trailer? Or, as it is in Kentucky, the distinction changes when utilities, such as electric power and water, are extended to the tiny house; does it become a (taxable) residence after a period of time? I know that keeping those real estate “improvements” down, for the valuation of the property, is of high importance.

Another thing worth emulating from Wheaton Labs is the “basecamp”. At the basecamp is the only portion of the property with grid electric service (it’s just one manufactured style home), with the rest of the property being entirely off-grid; solar & wind for power, rocket mass heaters for winter heat, “willow feeders” as an alternative to sewer service and access to a well for water. The risk is that any particular resident runs out of energy\heat during a deep winter storm, in such a way that their life is in danger. In this case, “basecamp” is the refuge a resident could travel towards in order to sleep through the storm in comfort. So a quillage should have such a building, which of course would raise the value of the property, and thus the taxes; but it doesn’t have to be much of a building to serve this purpose.

EDIT: Additionally, this centrally located “clubhouse” would serve as the community meeting room, and the point that municipal services such as electric, city water, wired internet & post delivery occurs; to keep the intrusion of outside employees\government observers off the property as much as is reasonable.

No Thank You!
I can go lots of places and experience the bother of dress codes. I prefer not, and definitely not trying to put my resources towards such.

I hope you do your thing at least half as much as you write about it. That was how BarterTowne outpaced the Quillage scene on all performance benchmarks, mostly through doing rather than publicly brainstorming with fairly limited supplementary writing to share about how the scene is going. For example sharing pictures regarding maintaining the roads and whatnot as we did that. I think Paul is similar in technique AFAIK.

Lots of other PMA type scenes are already out there with vague unwritten authoritarian rulesets to experience the bother of. I prefer our clearly defined minimal (written) ruleset.

However, as long as more land is managed by voluntaryists who are working to ostracize statists I’m happy to help towards that. For example Free Grafton has lots of variety among our potluck venues and attendees, some landlords require undergarments while others have no dress codes. Few people go beyond that to impose dress codes more restrictive than servile society and I’m unaware of any landlords infringing the love shared by guests but that could be a thing for some.

Traditionally, people live on there own with families rather than in a shared use community. HOAs are dreadful in my opinion. Having a decent leadership structure to manage the community with clearly defined rules and whatnot seems preferable IMHO. There are several popular venues around Free Grafton where tenants have stayed for extended periods.

Well, to each his own.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for years, but life gets in the way. I’ve looked more into doing it in southern Indiana, rather than NH; but mostly because I’m familiar with the forest in Indiana.