Affordable Housing Institute : US

By: David A. Smith

 

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

– Richard Starkey

Every one of us has all we need?

 

Perhaps it’s because, as city dwellers, we seek green space and crave privacy, but few destinations capture our imagination more than the idyllic deserted island.

 

Societal conventions optional

 

Yet we’re rational enough to realize that a tiny island will lack creature comforts – unless, that is, we build them, which seems the premise behind The Seasteading Institute, whose press release explains that a few months back:

 

The Seasteading Instiitute crowned the winners in its first Seasteading Architectural Design Contest to design the floating city of their dreams.

 

‘Floating city’ inevitably reminds me of Gulliver’s Island of Laputa, which Swift envisioned so he could satirize royal and aristocratic disengagement.

 

Wobbling along the cost of Balnibarbi

 

Seasteads are permanent, stationary structures specifically designed for long-term ocean living.

 

Which sounds good, until you realize that very few if any of these structures exist.

 

Maximizing our use of space!

 

Still, they make interesting speculations, so let’s take a look:

 

Overall Winner

 

$1,000 Grand Prize: The Swimming City — Andras Gyorfi 

 

Although it’s unclear, the Swimming City appears purely residential, which raises the question of its business model.  Not agriculture.  Not retail (we don’t make money just buying from ourselves).  Perhaps it’s recreational – a tourist destination – and those mid-rises are hotel rooms, although why in the world would you vacation on a floating island if all that trouble brought you was a hotel block with neighbors above, below, and on either side?

 

Aesthetic Design Winner

 

$250 Prize for Aesthetic Design: SESU Seastead — Marko Jarvela 

 

This structure seems to me internally contradictory.  Why would you establish yourself amid the ocean if your goal was to wrap yourself in a plastic and glass cocoon?  We tried that once, with Biosphere 2, whose financial demise I chronicled three years ago.  

 

Also, what’s with the batwings?

 

Personality Winner

 

$250 Prize for Personality: Rendering Freedom — Anthony Ling 

 

How this structure won a prize for personality is beyond me – do you see any?  (Notice the container ship sailing behind and on the right.)

 

Compared with the first two, it’s a smidgen more plausible.  Density has been increased through stacking, but the stacking is a compromise.  If you’re going to the trouble of sinking mammoth pylons into the ocean floor to support a superstructure, wouldn’t you go higher than a dozen stories? 

 

You idiot, he said pylons, not Cylons!

 

The complex is purely residential, although perhaps with office intermingled.  Since recreation is non-existent, the only business one could imagine conducting from this structure is information-based – a pirate radio station or offshore internet hosting company, perhaps. 

 

The architects have also included a sub-residential park, although it’s utterly impossible.  Aside from lacking sunlight to sustain the trees and greenery, any sub-structural space invariably decays as it’s neither owned nor defended.

 

A more typical sub-structural space

 

$250 Prize for Community Choice: Refusion — Team 3DA

 

Community Choice Winner

 

Granted the visuals are tremendous, this appears to be a seaborne shopping mall.  It’s got the lowest density of those seen so far, and seems completely impractical, a Las Vegas casino surrounded by a desert of water than of sand.

 

You wouldn’t want to go outside

 

Now that I think of it, a casino or pleasure palace would be a good real estate use, because it could be closely accessible by a larger territory, an Atlantic City of the ocean.

 

Best Picture Winner

 

$250 Prize for Best Picture: Oasis of The Sea — Emerson Stepp

 

(Evidently you have one orange submarine-taxi in every unit’s garage.)

 

While this may seem the most fanciful – explain to me why you have those scattered porthole windows? – in certain ways the Oasis of the Sea is the most practical, as it’s demonstrably a plutocrats’ playground, with 8-16 homes surrounding an enclosed, solar-powered atrium.  Its configuration suggests another possible use – the tax or extradition haven. 

 

When I read the release, I thought that lighthearted fun would be all one could make of it, but as happens frequently, these musings conceal a serious point:

 

The Seasteading Institute is a California nonprofit corporation that is in the process of applying for recognition of tax exemption under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. TSI’s mission is to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.

 

‘Autonomous social, political, and legal systems?’  Evidently sea structures have less to do with livability and much more to do with selective secession from organized society – or at least, keeping a larger government at a safe, international-waters distance.  Superficially, it sound promising – the full resources of nation and government at hand, yet held at arm’s length by a claim of sovereignty.  Instance, imagine an independent nation, the self-styled Principality of Sealand, six miles off the coast of Essex:

 

In or out of Britain?   Depends on when you ask.

 

A far cry from the Seasteading Institute’s dreams, Sealand is a grim, man-made rock:

 

Room for a helipad and not much else: Sealand.

 

As chronicled in Wikipedia:

 

In 1942, during World War II, HM Fort Roughs was constructed by the United Kingdom as one of the Maunsell Forts, primarily for defense against German mine-laying aircraft that might be targeting the estuaries that were part of vital shipping lanes.  It comprised a floating pontoon base with a superstructure of two hollow towers joined by a deck upon which other structures could be added. The fort was towed to a position above the Rough Sands sandbar, where its base was intentionally flooded to allow it to sink to its final resting place on the sandbar.

 

For such a tiny bit of real estate, Sealand has had a violent and contentious history. 

 

On 2 September 1967, the fort was occupied by Major Paddy Roy Bates, a British subject and pirate radio broadcaster, who ejected a competing group of pirate broadcasters.  Bates intended to broadcast his pirate radio station Radio Essex from the platform.

 

Perhaps Major Bates is not the buffoon suggested by his actions.  As we speculated above, an information-based business (in the 1960s pirate radio, today internet gambling) doesn’t need a large footprint but does need legal protection.  Sealand, however unlovely, might be very profitable – at any rate, the Bateses have fiercely defended it:

 

Paddy Roy Bates (right) and his ‘royal family’, 1967

 

In 1968, the Royal Navy entered what Bates claimed to be his territorial waters, in order to service a navigational buoy near the platform. Michael Bates (son of Paddy Roy Bates) tried to scare the workmen off by firing warning shots from the former fort. As Bates was a British subject at the time, he was summoned to court in England following the incident.  The court ruled that as the platform (which Bates was now calling “Sealand”) was outside British jurisdiction, being beyond the then three-mile limit of the country’s waters, the case could not proceed. In 1975, Bates introduced a constitution for Sealand, followed by a flag, a national anthem, a currency and passports.

 

A mini-war was fought over Sealand:

 

In 1978, while Bates was away, Alexander Achenbach, who describes himself as the Prime Minister of Sealand, and several German and Dutch citizens staged a forcible takeover of Roughs Tower, holding Bates’ son Michael captive, before releasing him several days later in the Netherlands. Bates thereupon enlisted armed assistance and, in a helicopter assault, retook the fort. He then held the invaders captive, claiming them as prisoners of war. Most participants in the invasion were repatriated at the cessation of the “war”, but Achenbach, a German lawyer who held a Sealand passport, was charged with treason against Sealand, and was held unless he paid DM 75,000 (more than US$ 35,000). 

 

Don’t you find it striking that these self-styled libertarians have no means of settling their disputes short of violence, and calling in real governments?

 

We’re not here to defend Sealand’s independence

 

The governments of the Netherlands and Germany petitioned the British government for his release, but the United Kingdom disavowed all responsibility, citing the 1968 court decision.  Germany then sent a diplomat from its London embassy to Roughs Tower to negotiate for Achenbach’s release. Roy Bates relented after several weeks of negotiations and subsequently claimed that the diplomat’s visit constituted de facto recognition of Sealand by Germany. Following his repatriation, Achenbach established a “government in exile” in Germany, in opposition to Roy Bates, assuming the name “Chairman of the Privy Council”. He handed the position to Johannes Seiger in 1989 because of illness. Seiger continues to claim—via his website—that he is Sealand’s legitimate ruling authority.

 

The case for Sealand as an economic fiction is strengthened by this nugget:

 

The facility is now occupied by one or more caretakers representing Michael Bates, who himself resides in Essex, England.

 

This then is the story of Sealand, and of these seasteading fancies.  With current technology, they are impractical as residences, and further impractical as havens, depending as they do on the resources of government to bail them out when trouble strikes:

 

Sealand on fire, 2006

 

On the afternoon of 23 June 2006, the top platform of the Roughs Tower caught fire from an electrical failure. A Royal Air Force rescue helicopter transferred one person to Ipswich hospital, directly from the tower. The Harwich lifeboat stood by the Roughs Tower until a local fire tug extinguished the fire. All damage was repaired by November 2006. 

 

We started this post in the realms of fantasy – imagined free-floating self-contained sea residences, able to be what the individual whim wants them to be – and we end it in mundanity, with the recognition that a micro-entity cannot sustain itself as independent without exercising the functions of government.

 

Even Gulliver’s Laputa needed to follow the shoreline of Balnibarbi on which it depended.

 

Don’t stray from your land base

 

As we live a life of ease
Every one of us has all we need
(One of us, has all we need)
Sky of blue and sea of green
(Sky of blue, sea of green)
In our yellow submarine
(In our yellow, submarine, aha)

 

A better fantasy of a floating city: Costner’s Waterworld