The Revolution begins with buying an old mall and converting it into a gated condominium complex.
The Revolution begins with buying an old mall and converting it into a gated condominium complex.
You think I’m joking, but I’m not, really.
You can take advantage of the facilities the mall already has to build lots of cheap residential housing with a large all-seasons enclosed area for people to mingle, or turn it into a mixed-use development that can help pay for operating costs.
It can be large enough to house a few hundred or even a thousand people, which you’re going to need in order to function as the starting power base of your ideology. It can be your stronghold, and where you bring people to build theory and be educated. If you have enough people (and enough revenue), you can also influence local politics to protect yourself.
It can be as cheap as $10/sqft, or even cheaper, so if your typical resident has a 1,000 sqft unit, you’re talking $10,000/per prior to retrofitting costs.
It already has parking, and you can tear up the extra parking to make a large park area for your community’s children to play in. Various shared-use facilities can be added to make it more appealing, both practically and financially. A cooperative convenience store can be added to save money for residents through bulk orders and cut down on commuting time.
You can test your governance philosophy on a reasonably-sized scale through a combination of contract law and ownership of the facility. If it fails, it won’t explode and kill everyone. If it succeeds, you can slowly buy up adjacent territories.
If only this was actually legal
“Darn zoning regulations,” say man holding ten million dollars and plan to tranaform mall that otherwise poses risk to town’s crime rates, unaware of how desperate city council are to get rid of mall.
In terms of “how likely is this to turn into a cult” this is uh…
“ It can be your stronghold, and where you bring people to build theory and be educated. If you have enough people (and enough revenue), you can also influence local politics to protect yourself.“
So, like the scientology buildings?
Seriously though, it sounds like a good way to build a community, and shared enclosed space sounds great. But having compound where you bring people to be educated and have enough control over them to test out your ideas of governance is literally a cult. Especially if you’re doing it to try and start a revolution.
All the best intentions in the world will not stop that setup from being the kind of thing people write books about escaping from.
The risk factor depends on the magnitude of ideological difference with the host society.
You can’t prevent it with intentions, but with design. The first question is, how easy is it to leave?
I’d suggest a substantial security deposit (thousands of dollars) built up over the years, which can only be deducted for actual damage to the property, to be held by the bank. The resident owns the security deposit and collects interest from it. The corporation owning the converted mall can check that the deposit is still in the bank, and can file against it for damages to the property, but those filings for damage can be disputed in civil court. Aside from that, it can’t access it.
This makes it so that when someone leaves, they automatically have money, and there’s also strong incentive not to damage the property.
Additionally, since this isn’t a violent revolution, you don’t need blackmail material, and will therefore, as a policy, not collect it.
And so on.
Indoor malls are insanely expensive to heat, cool, and maintain, a lot of their midcentury mushrooming has to do with front-loaded capital depreciation schedules that offset this with low taxes for the first decade or two