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A new form of housing for nomads
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Seniors in their RVs travelling around the country, software designers making a new product, movie crews shooting on location, and construction workers in a national firm: all these have in common an element of the nomadic lifestyle.
Migratory species tend to move north and south with the weather or to follow food chains and the idea of a "home base" seems irrelevant to this pattern. The nomadic workers in our economy tend to go where the work is, or work where they want to. Nomads have voted to travel as a part of their lifestyle.
Most of western society, however, includes a permanent fixed address tied to a physical location. Nomadism needs this physical location like it needs a broken water heater - it ties you down, chains you to a mortgage (or rent payments to someone else with the mortgage) and a bunch of possessions.
Our acquisitive society has built an entire culture of consumption around this premise. Americans do historically move every 5 years or so, making us highly mobile, but we still have that fixation for a physical address to define us. And what is that address anyway, except a delivery point for the U. S. Postal service?
With a cell phone, emergency workers can locate someone using a GPS system, negating the need for a physical address. With online banking, most bills can be paid using the computer, in whatever location suits the payer - the beach, the library. No particular need ties us to a physical address so much anymore.
By decoupling the person with the place, there is a rising niche of nomadism that will alter society in ways yet to be foretold. The alterations to the physical form of our places may be subtle, as our towns and cities adapt to nomadic lifestyles.
Nomadic living places may be dispersed throughout the city, a house here, an apartment there. What they have in common is a points-based way to fund the housing, wherein the owner pays points to a mortgage company and redeems them to live in a particular place during his work assignment or visit with the grandkids. Then, he moves on.
The points pay for the mortgage, and his maintenance fees pay for the upkeep of the property. The Owner doesn't actually buy a deed to a property, but rather the use rights to multiple properties. The points are redeemed on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Sound a little like timeshare? It is exactly like timeshare. The principle difference is that timeshare tends to cluster users togther in a single, gated community. Points-based housing options may do this - developers may experiment with homogenous, points-based housing communities - but more likely some of the existing housing surplus will be absorbed by a developer who can quickly take advantage of this opportunity.
Timeshare developers, while desparate for a new market, will unlikely try this because of their stubborn belief that the market will come back. Any day now. Housing developers, while experiencing the pain of oversupply, are unlikely to have this option, either, due to their deep relationship with the rigid banking system that reinforces mortgages and rental as the only two options for the end user.
No, if nomads want this kind of option, they will probably have to create it for themselves. Already some have experimented with this system in California, taking a few units in one well-known timeshare and owning the entire year rather than a couple of weeks; and within the timeshare industry itself, more than one executive has taken the physical plan of a timeshare unit (which has been designed with incredible precision to be as ergonomic and aesthetically appealing as possible) and build it as a permanent residence. With the rise of the nomadic culture, it is only a matter of time before we see this form of housing happen in the New Economy.
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