— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Four — Allocating land otherwise · Chapter 15

15 Democratic allocation: need, sortition, upkeep

The previous chapter set out the form: land communalised as bare ownership, use recognised through inhabitation and recorded in an inalienable title. This form extinguishes rent and guarantees the home; but it leaves open the question which the whole inventory has shown to command the rest. When a dwelling falls vacant (an occupant dies without a surviving household, another moves away), it reverts to the commune: to whom should it be allocated, and how? This is the third question, and it is the stumbling block of the century. Wherever price ceased to allocate without deliberation taking its place, status returned: the party card in Moscow, the diploma and the post in Belgrade, the clan’s favour in Tripoli, the counter in Havana — a sign that abolishing rent without democratising allocation does not remove the inhabitant’s subjection, but displaces it, from the landlord to the apparatus that allocates.

What is needed, then, is less a principle than an institution, and this chapter builds it in four pieces, each answering a precise risk that history has documented. The scale of need, against the return of favour. The commission drawn by lot, against the capture of allocation by those who hold it. The upkeep contribution and the pair that accompanies it — a premium for improvement, a penalty for deterioration — against the ruin of the housing stock that followed almost every exit from the market. And the regime of supported use, so that the home remains guaranteed even for those who cannot manage it. Here again, we argue what ought to be; but each piece has its counterpart in a real experience, and that is what distinguishes an institution from a utopia.

15.1 Need put on a scale: objective criteria, national bounds

Allocation must rest on objective, published criteria, ordered by need: the size of the household relative to that of the dwelling, proximity to the place of work, proximity to relatives and family — in decreasing order of priority. There is nothing unprecedented in the principle: it is that of the Viennese Punktesystem of 1922, which chapter 12 hailed as “the century’s only more or less honourable answer” — a points scale, on published criteria (overcrowding, insalubrity, notice to quit, invalidity, pregnancy), ranking applications into classes of urgency and providing for appeals. Contemporary systems for scoring housing demand, from Dutch choice-based letting to the French scoring (cotation) of social-housing applications, show that such objectification is technically mature; what they lack is not the technique, it is democratic decision upstream of the criteria and control downstream of their application.¹

But the objectivity of the scale is not enough, and Belgrade administers the proof by absurdity: its scale was objective (points, written rules), and yet it inverted need, giving forty points to the diploma and thirty to overcrowding, ending in the involuntary watchword of the press of the day, “an apartment according to the diploma”. Since an objective scale can codify injustice as well as justice, two requirements must frame the criteria themselves.

The first fixes the content: the criteria measure need, never merit or status. The size of the household, the distance to work, the proximity of relatives are facts of need — they state the intensity with which a household requires this dwelling rather than another. The diploma, the grade, seniority in the firm, social “contribution” have no place there: they are the Trojan horses of status, through which the aristocracy of the card and the post re-entered in Belgrade. It is the exact difference between allocating according to needs and allocating according to merits — between Marx’s maxim and its contrary.

The second fixes the scale of decision and its bounds. The criteria are set and applied at the communal level, because that is where need is ascertained — who knows better than a community the composition of its households, the map of its jobs, the fabric of its solidarities? It is the level at which the assembly has, in fact, proved able to allocate land according to need: Chiapas, Rojava. But communal autonomy, left to itself, can produce its own arbitrariness — local favouritism, insularity, the exclusion of the stranger to the village. It is therefore held by national bounds: a bedrock of non-negotiable rights, withdrawn from all local deliberation — no discrimination by origin, sex, religion or opinion; absolute priority of need over any other consideration; a right of appeal. This bedrock does not stop at the commune’s borders: it holds everywhere, and it is enforceable. These bounds are no abstract precaution: wherever allocation has been made by “communal preference”, it has produced the best-documented discrimination in social housing, testing operations measuring there a systematic gap to the detriment of applicants of foreign origin.² We meet here a principle that the analysis of the commons has drawn out: rules of use are the more robust the more they are nested in levels — local autonomy to decide the concrete, wider bodies to guarantee rights and arbitrate the conflicts that overflow the commune.³ This articulation — to the commune the concrete decision, to the nation the bedrock that bounds it — is the one that neither the centralising State (which decided everything from above) nor the isolated assembly (which answered for nothing beyond itself) had managed to hold.

15.2 Sortition and deliberation: settling conflicts

A scale, however just, leaves cases it does not settle: two households of equal need for the same dwelling, a contested criterion, a situation no rule has foreseen. Who then decides? The whole question lies there, for it is through this margin of appraisal that status reintroduces itself: in Belgrade, the “executives’ apartments” were distributed “almost without any procedure”, by decision of the director, with no possible appeal; in Tripoli, allocation proceeded, by the regime’s own admission, “on the basis of favouritism and personal connections”. The margin of appraisal is inevitable; what is not inevitable is that it be entrusted to a permanent and opaque power. It is therefore entrusted to its exact opposite: a body that is temporary, drawn by lot and public.

In case of conflict, two revocable commissions, drawn by lot from among the inhabitants in the manner of criminal-court jurors, deliberate and deliver an opinion. Each feature of this arrangement answers a documented failure.

Sortition, against election as against appointment. Allocation is a power; every permanent power attracts clientelism, and election itself does not escape it, making the candidate a man with obligations to contract and the elected allocator a patron. The lot, for its part, cannot be courted: no one campaigns to be drawn, no one builds up a clientele. This is why the tradition holds sortition to be the properly democratic procedure, while election has been, since Athens, the aristocratic procedure — the one that selects the “best”, hence the distinguished, hence the notables.⁴ It thus does to the power of allocating what communalisation does to the land: as the latter withdraws the plot from the market, the lot withdraws the decision from the play of positions and clienteles, and shields it from any lasting appropriation.

Public deliberation, against the secrecy of the counter. We assume here an inversion of the judicial model from which the sortition is borrowed. The criminal jury deliberates behind closed doors; the allocation commission deliberates in public. The reason for the divergence lies in the nature of the act: punishing an individual calls for the secrecy that protects intimacy and the juror’s freedom; allocating a common good calls, on the contrary, for publicity, which alone makes the decision controllable and contestable. Publicity is what was missing from every allocation in the inventory — the Yugoslav commissions sitting on lists prepared in advance by management, the Libyan committees distributing in the shadows. Public deliberation exposes reasons, and thereby makes them open to criticism.

Two commissions, against capture. A single body, even one drawn by lot, can err, be got round, or simply rule too narrowly. Two are therefore drawn, distinct, deliberating separately: their agreement carries the decision, their disagreement sends it back for a new public examination and, if need be, to an enlarged draw. This redundancy is no cumbersome formality: it is the elementary guarantee that no contested allocation rests on a single body, the possible captive of an interest. The precedent exists: the German-speaking community of Belgium has given itself a permanent citizens’ council drawn by lot, with two distinct organs, one setting the agenda and the other deliberating.⁵

Revocability and rotation, against entrenchment. The commissions are revocable and their mandate is not renewable: no one makes a career of allocation, no one settles into it long enough to turn it into a fief. It is the principle the Zapatistas call mandar obedeciendo (to command by obeying), which the lot, publicity and rotation translate into procedure.

There remains the objection such arrangements always meet: is not the opinion of an assembly drawn by lot merely consultative, hence powerless? Contemporary mini-publics suffer from it — the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate learned it, its proposals promised “unfiltered” and then filtered.⁶ The lesson is clear, and we turn it around: what condemns the consultative mini-public is precisely that it does not decide. The allocation commission, for its part, decides — its deliberation is the allocation, subject only to the national bedrock of rights, and under the control of the judge who guards that bedrock. It is not a rubber-stamp chamber consulted for form’s sake; it is the authority that settles the matter, because the deliberation of those concerned is here the source of legitimacy, and not an ornament of someone else’s decision.

15.3 Upkeep without rent: the contribution, improvement, deterioration

The arbiter of the whole inventory was the fate of the housing stock, and the verdict was almost everywhere the same: ruin. In Moscow, the abolition of rent in 1921 carried away the financing of upkeep, and the decay began there; in Havana, Old Havana suffers two partial collapses every three days; three quarters of the Ethiopian kebele stock was beyond repair by 1996. The cause is single and structural: a rent reduced to nothing does not cover upkeep, and a titleholder who can realise nothing from his dwelling has no reason to put anything of his own into it. The regime proposed here must therefore solve upkeep without restoring the rent or the transferability of which ruin was the price. It does so by a contribution and by an incentive-penalty pair.

The upkeep contribution replaces rent. Vienna gave its exact model, and chapter 12 noted the decomposition: the rent of the Gemeindebau comprised no capital to repay, no interest to service, no ground rent to remit, but only upkeep, management, taxes and a reserve for future repairs — hence a rent divided by six, without a single wall changing in quality. The contribution of use is this decomposition generalised: each household pays, not a rent, but its share of the real cost of maintaining the stock — routine upkeep, management, and the funding of a pooled reserve fund for major works.⁷ It is not a tribute: it is the price of the thing itself, paid to no one who grows rich by it. The difference from rent is the one the whole book has dug out — between paying for real production (upkeep, which is labour) and paying for the holding of a title (rent, which is nothing).

On this base are built the two systems that exit from the market makes necessary, because it deprives the stock of the two signals the market, at its exorbitant cost, supplied: the reward of those who improve, the sanction of those who let things decay.

First system: the improvement premium. The problem is well known, and it is Cuba’s: if you cannot sell your dwelling, why invest your labour and your money in it? The market settled the matter by the capital gain at resale; but that gain is for the most part location rent, which is precisely what we set out to abolish. The solution therefore does not consist in restoring the capital gain, but in distinguishing, within what the occupant adds, what belongs to incorporated capital — drainage, insulation, extension, durable equipment. Chapter 1 established it, and Marx before it: capital really incorporated into the land is not rent; it is labour and capital, to be credited as such. The rule follows from this distinction: improvements made by the occupant are credited to him — either reimbursed at their amortised value on the day he leaves the dwelling (since they increase its use for the next occupant, and the collectivity then buys back real capital, not speculative rent), or deducted from his contribution. The occupant is thus given an incentive to improve, exactly like the market owner, but without any locational gain accruing to him: incorporated labour is rewarded, never position — the book’s cardinal distinction, between production and the toll, thus translated into an incentive mechanism.⁸

Second system: the penalty for deterioration. The reverse of the premium is responsibility. All holders of use are responsible for upkeep — each for his own, and all for the common parts, whose abandonment was, in the kommunalka, the ordinary form of ruin: the space no one owns as his own, no one cares for. The theory of commons governance has shown how to avoid it, and it is neither by privatisation nor by state police, but by three springs the commune can hold: monitoring exercised by the users themselves, graduated sanctions, and accessible arbitration.⁹ The penalty is graduated: at the first breach, a reminder and the obligation to restore; on repetition, an increase in the contribution, in proportion to the damage caused to the collectivity; for wilful and persistent deterioration, in the last resort, the loss of the title of use — but pronounced, like every contested decision, by the commissions drawn by lot, in public, with appeal, never by an administrator alone. Collective responsibility for the common parts is borne by the collective of the building’s occupants, which the contribution finances and which the commission arbitrates in the event of a free rider. Where the market threatened eviction and seizure, the commune opposes a scale of deliberated sanctions: less brutal, but no less effective, and with no rent at the end.

The regime of the voluntary tenant, finally. Not everyone wants this responsibility — and nothing obliges anyone to want it. Many prefer what the lease gave them at its best: to dwell without having to worry about the roof, the boiler or the façade. The regime allows them to: whoever does not wish to carry the burden of the title remains a tenant of the commune. His status as inhabitant is identical — a domicile inviolable and proof against eviction, allocated by the same scale; only the division of charges changes. The commune, a landlord without rent, carries the structural works; the occupant answers only for everyday use (seals, light bulbs, minor repairs), and his contribution is increased accordingly, since it pays for the upkeep work that others perform in his place. This increase, however, is nothing punitive: the difference covers a real cost, never a tribute — the distinction of chapter 1, applied down to the schedule of charges. Vienna proves, moreover, that this status is no mere stopgap: a century of municipal tenants at a rent without ground rent, and no one has seen a servitude in it.

15.4 Supported use: a home for those who cannot manage it

There remains the limit case, the one that tests a regime better than any other: the person who cannot manage his own place of living. Disability, old age, and so on: there are situations in which a holder of use cannot, alone, maintain his dwelling, pay his contribution, or carry out the formalities that life in society requires. The temptation here is always the same: either abandon the person to ruin in the name of autonomy, or dispossess him of his home in the name of his own good. The regime proposed here refuses both, and it refuses them in the name of the criterion that commands the whole book: the home is inviolable, including for those who cannot maintain it.

The guiding principle is the one clinical experience has ended up establishing against decades of contrary practice: housing stability is not the reward for a life set back in order, it is its condition. That is the lesson of “Housing First” — the person is not asked to prove deserving of a roof by first “reintegrating”; she is first given a stable home, and support comes afterwards, at home.¹⁰ The title of use is therefore never withdrawn on grounds of incapacity: one has not lost one’s right to a home because one no longer knows how to manage it.

The aid takes the form of support, not substitution. This is the shift that the international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities effected in law: moving from guardianship (which decides in the person’s place and strips her of her capacity) to supported decision-making (which decides with her, respecting her preferences).¹¹ Concretely, upkeep is provided by dedicated services, the contribution deducted and, where need be, taken over, the formalities carried out with the person or on her behalf — without the title of use changing hands. The range of arrangements already exists, from supported tenancy to home care; what the regime adds is that none of them entails the loss of the home.

There remain the extreme cases, where the person can consent to nothing: a protective arrangement is then unavoidable. But it is held by the same guarantees as the rest of the regime, and withdrawn from the power of any single person. It is not an administrator, nor a guardian appointed for life, who decides on the support and its extent: it is the deliberative commission, drawn by lot, sitting this time behind closed doors (the protection of the person requires it), subject to appeal and to periodic review, seeking first the person’s presumed will and interest — and the inviolability of her domicile remains the rule, which only a proven necessity may bend, and never abolish.¹² The guardian’s arbitrariness is thus exchanged for the control of deliberation: the protection of the most vulnerable is not confiscated by a bureaucracy, it remains a democratic act, supervised and reversible.

Assessment

The three criteria are met, and met by construction. Rent is abolished by the form of property — land communalised, the title of use inalienable (chapter 14). The home is guaranteed by that same title: inviolable, stable, unshareable. Allocation is democratic by the scale of need, bounded by national rights, and by the commissions drawn by lot that settle in public what the scale leaves open. The ruin of the stock, which undid almost every exit from the market, is warded off by the upkeep contribution and by the pair that distinguishes, down to the incentive, the capital one rewards from the rent one suppresses. And the most vulnerable person himself keeps a home, because the stability of the domicile is not the reward of a successful life but the ground of any life.

This is the third term of the alternative, the one the inventory had drawn out and which no regime from above had attempted: neither price, nor status, but deliberation. All the regimes of chapter 12 had abolished rent for the people; none by it. Chiapas and Rojava had approached it, from below and under war. What these two chapters add is the legal form and the institutional apparatus that would make it possible to hold it at another scale, and in peace: property of use for the law, the commune as bare owner and the commissions drawn by lot for the institution.

There remains the hardest question, and it is the one the introduction has already named. Such a regime does not install itself by persuasion: it withdraws from a class the income it draws from the holding of land, and the dominant never yield that power without being forced to. How does one pass from the order of price to the order of use? What are the levers, the resistances, the paths? That is the object of the final chapter: the transition.