Seedling House Purchasing

Introduction

‘Seedling House’ is the name we are calling the first property the Brassica Collective is planning to buy. Its name will probably be changed to something more fitting when its character is more fully established, such as when retrofitting is complete.

This agreement describes our agreement for purchasing Seedling house, including Why, What, When and How we purchase.

Status

This agreement is being developed (and agreed to) in multiple stages, and so its completeness is reflected here.

Overall status: ❌ (not ready for purchase)

• Why
  • Site vision ✅
  • Enough multi-site vision ✅
• What
  • Site selection principles ✅
  • Purchase decision elements ❌
    • required criteria ❌
    • ideal criteria ❌
    • scoring rubric ❌
    • budget ❌
• When
  • Purchase workflow ❌
    • pre-purchase
      • roadmap ❌
      • roles and responsibilities ❌
      • role assignment ❌
      • participant commitments ❌
    • post purchase
      • roadmap ❌
      • roles and responsibilities ❌
      • budget ❌
      • initial resident selection process ❌
      • participant commitments ❌
      • risk assessment ❌
    • Timeline ❌
• How
  • Purchase ethical principles ❌
  • Purchase decision process ❌
  • Registered legal entity ❌
  • Legal instuments for transitional equity ❌
  • legal instruments for residents & regular financial contributors ❌
  • Collective Go / No-Go major decision ❌
    • Dependent on items from other crews and found in other documents ❌
      • Clarity on who makes decisions about the site and how to live on site ❌

Why

Site Vision

The Brassica Collective envisages a first house that is an example of the goals of RAD Housing that we can all engage with. We will take a traditional Australian suburban home, and give it the “retrosuburban” transformation to make it fit for living in community during the polycrisis.

Based on our Site Selection Principles, we will take a house that is currently lacking sustainability features, and yet has the potential to be an example of sustainable living embedded in broader community. We will create resilience features and grow food to help support ourselves and our neighbours. We will transform the space for inclusion and access (including features like wheelchair ramps, and coeliac cooking options). We will provide living spaces that support diverse life needs, including ensuring some options for more solo-living. Our focus will be particularly on collective spaces, to support resource-sharing, wellbeing and even elements of collective luxury and joy. We will ensure that the house has a good chance of avoiding risks so that it can continue to supply these benefits to communities into the future.

Seedling House is also the first house for the Brassica Collective, and as such it will hold the focus and hopes of the collective as we swarm around it to plan the retrofit together. As described in more detail below, it will be a fairly large, busy and experimental house during this planning and retrofit period, and will help us learn what community features we need in future houses. Once the retrofit is done, and the collective is swarming around another house, Seedling House may adopt a new name, theme and goals.

Given this unique role as the first house in the collective, we agree to two high level goals for Seedling House during this period up until both the retrofit is complete and the collective has a second site. These will inform further agreements on selection criteria, our design choices, our site budget, and some aspects of governance.

1. A practice ground for community living

As it is the first house in the collective, Seedling House will likely house less than half of the collective’s participants.

Given this we want Seedling House to be chosen and set up in a way that is well suited to hosting people who are not permanent residents (particularly other Brassica Collective participants) so that we can have experiences of collective living. This particularly applies to aspects of home life such as eating together, social connection, sleeping over, working from home, etc.

We envisage that during this phase Seedling House has:

• Several additional beds available for this use, and clear processes on how to use them. These don’t need to be across several rooms, for example a bedroom with several bunk beds might suffice. The house should still function socially if these beds are used (ie, it shouldn’t require closing off an important shared space).
• Space to park vans.
• Space for group eating, perhaps for all Brassica Collective participants at once, even if it’s a bit spread out and chaotic.
• Cooking, bathroom and laundry facilities that support the expanded size of the household if all beds are used & we have people staying in vans.
• More than one common space for social interaction, to help us navigate community connections, conflict, and interpersonal relationships.

However, it should be explicitly stated that this goal is intended to maximise opportunity for experimenting with community living. It is not the same as making this house a commercial venue or community centre. We still expect to utilise community venues for some functions, and so it is not necessary to optimise Seedling House for large but rare events (such as running monthly assemblies). A diversity of common areas in the building might be better than a large meeting hall.

2. Leveraging housing needs to build a collective asset base

Seedling House will be purchased at a time when the collective has no other major assets, making it harder to get a loan and creating more financial stress around mortgage repayments than later in the project.

Given this, one approach would be to buy the cheapest possible house. However, larger houses are cheaper per bedroom. So, our goal is to buy a property with a low per-resident cost. This should be considered both in terms of the current state of the house, and the per-resident cost when retrofitted.

This allows us to utilise the fact that we have multiple people in our collective who need housing and would otherwise be paying landlords or mortgages, and instead can leverage that same cost to pay off a collective asset faster.

Specifically this means:

• Favour houses with more bedrooms (five would be ideal) providing that doesn’t drive the per-resident cost too high (we’re not shopping for luxury mansions).
• Favour properties with space for parking vans.
• Consider properties that can fit a temporary additional transportable “pod” room in the yard, or that have an existing “granny flat”, as a way of providing extra accommodation before the proper second smaller dwelling is built (aka the “brussel sprouts”).

What

This section will be informed by the Site Selection Principles.

When

This section will be added later, after group process.

How

This section will be added later, after group process.

Review conditions

This agreement (Version 1.1) will be reviewed in any of the following circumstances:

• Whenever a participant proposes an amendment to this agreement
• When any agreement in the set of Participation Agreements is amended
• Prior to the first participants living in a collectively stewarded site
• Every two years (if not otherwise reviewed in that timeframe)