FAQs
Q: So what is the difference between Peace Mob Gardens and the Kearsley Park Block Redevelopment Project? A: The Peace Mob Gardens is an open community-driven gardening and urban farming project utilizing filled in house lots between Kearsley Park Boulevard and Broadway Avenue. Kearsley Park Block Redevelopment Project is a democratically- operated, worker- owned private housing co-operative
which takes abandoned and foreclosed Land Bank houses and re-activates these vacant spaces, maintaining and slowly improving the quality of homes and living conditions in the neighborhood. Q: So what are you guys doing out there? A: We work hard at what we do. All with no pay. We do it because it's what we believe in. We feel the world's broken, and we're working to make it a better place, in our own style. Many of us are idealists. We are mostly focused on sustainability, music, arts, culture, environmentalism, technology, and revitalization of Flint. To attempt to attack all these problems alone or at once is impossible, illogical, and naive (or very egotistical), so we are collecting/gathering up individuals that have a common ideology, common lifestyles, common goals, with variously different cultures, talents, and methodologies. Q: Who are we looking to live with? A: If your big into getting off the grid. Fixing up broken stuff. Making machines, art, crafts, etc. out of found, recycled, reused, re-purposed items. Making music, art, crafts, gardens, machines, fixing houses, starting businesses, managing schedules, coordinating events, educating, learning, debating politics, engaging in political/social/philosophical conversation/debate, farming, developing new sustainable technologies and lifestyles, etc... then you would probably be a good fit for us and us a good fit for you. Q: What's the benefit of living with other people? What's the point? A: One thing we commonly say here, is that to try and do this alone is like one person trying to tear down a brick wall, by punching with just their fist. But if we gather enough people together, we can tear that wall down together. If there is one musician living in an area/space/block/house... they come home, and may practice alone, but most likely will not. But if we build a community with many many musicians, then they can all encourage each other to spend their personal/free time practicing, writing, developing, performing, honing their skills of being a musician, and pursuing their passions. Same applies to creatives of any type: crafters, gardeners, artists, writers, activists, etc... together we can help each other grow, and develop. Another benefit we see of building a community, is that many of us have multifaceted personalities, wants, desires, passions, and dreams. Monday I may wake up and want to work on my skills sewing. Tuesday I may want to paint. Wednesday I may want to work on learning how to blow glass, or weld metal.... to do all these things I would need a HUGE house, with a room or space dedicated to each type of activity. In a community, we can use spaces in various different houses as "community" space and build a room just for sewing, a room just for painting, etc...
Q: What is the long term goal of this project? A: As you may know, Flint is quite a depressed area. It's got some serious problems, and living in the conditions created by the economical and social problems we endure, can be difficult. Overcoming, counteracting, and solving those problems are something that can only be achieved through group efforts. As a community, we can pool our money together, band our talents and skills together, and each portions of our time for the pursuit of creating a better neighborhood, block, city, environment in which to exist... The PeaceMob, the garden, and the community are all created, designed, and engineered all to facilitate those hopes, desires, and dreams. Q: So what is up with rent and bills? A: We take all the bills from all the houses and put it in a big pool, then each individual person is responsible for an equal share. We also all vote every month on an investment amount that we will each pay so that we can pool our resources together to fix these broken homes, purchase more homes that lay in waste and abandonment on our blocks to make space for more people who share our vision/dreams, and create the infrastructure to accommodate the needs of our artists, musicians, crafters, activists, gardeners, etc... As well as someday create economic infrastructure (start democratic worker owner businesses) to help free ourselves from the economic mechanisms of modern American capitalism/corporatism that so often breaks the hearts, souls, spirits, and even emotional bonds of a person, family, society and our culture as a whole. Thirdly we all vote each month and each commit to a few "priority projects" that are our goal for the month to help get us closer to our over all goals, and how many hours each of us will equally contribute to this.Equality, sustainability, engagement... all things that we believe. understanding us and understanding what life is like here involves not just an understanding of our goals. but also where we are at, and how long we expect it to take. those answers are much more simple. this will take decades. not years of waiting for a problem to be solved, or someone else to do it (like in standard American culture), but years and decades of hard work, dedication, and effort. There are days and weeks where we have a blast doing all this, and times when its the hardest thing in the world. We are in the very infant stages of development. We have a few community owned homes, some land, and some resources. But we ourselves are still developing the social skills to live together in a democratically regulated community. We are constantly developing the methodologies and social systems to regulate ourselves as we learn what works and doesn't work for us at the time. It's quite and interesting experiment to live in. And a rewarding challenge. We see ourselves as trying to create something that will last beyond ourselves. So we try to create systems that will protect the project from and corruptions that could exist within the human element as decades pass.
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Q: What's up with the rent and other costs? A: Rent's not really the right word for how things work here. As mentioned early, we are trying to build a permanent community. Renters are by definition, not a permanent resident. Also as mentioned above, we all split the bills equally, investment equally, and work equally. As far as what your responsibility would be monetarily, it really depends on many things. The quick, easy, kinda true, but not really, answer is $200/mo per adult. Since water bills, electric, etc... all vary each month, our bills change every month. Also, since we add up the bills and divide equally, bills change based on the amount of people living in the community. But a good way to view it is about $200/mo per adult. it may be a little less, or a little more, but thats a pretty accurate way of thinking about it. Each person in our community has equal rights, equal responsibilities. Equal bills is part of our equal responsibilities. Each bill payer also has the right to their own bedroom. So as a couple, you two could share one of your rooms your entitled too, and use the other for both kids. If you ever wanted a third room so each child could have their own room, it would be an additional share of bills. Families also tend to desire a bit more privacy than single people. So if you wanted a whole home all to yourselves, we would have to discus that. We've always talked about this situation and how to deal with it when it happens. And our ideology/hope is to have enough space to offer families an entire home that is "theirs". More specifically, we mean an entire home where none of the space is considered "community space". So no sewing rooms, crafting rooms, etc... that would be accessible by anyone in the community. That is, if that's what the family desired. Q: Other options? A: If you did want to live here, there are other options. there are some homes available for sale that we do not own. you could purchase, and live here as private residents, not under the system of our community, but next door neighbors (theres 6 homes owned, and 2 rented like this already outside of our community homes). There's also a program coming up from the land bank where they will sell you the home for nothing, or very little, with the condition that you get it fixed up in a period of time, and they will loan you the money to fix it all up. It's a system referred to as an "urban homesteading initiative" they have been specifically designing one just for our area, and specifically to help people who are interested in living in our area and being a part of our community. Homes purchased thorough the land bank our usually in the range of $100-200 per month, and for about 1-3 years. No credit check, no employment check, no difficult paperwork. Basically just a few hundred bucks down, and less info than it takes to make an email account. in about 6-9 months. Q: So what is the quality of life there? A: Not all our homes or all homes in Flint have heat, water, etc... or everything in working order. We are working on fixing that problem in our community. We have inherited 40 years of abandonment… it will take a few years to get it all back in working order. If you were to live in our community, you would need to accept off the grid living. It's one of our goals, and were looking for people who share that goal. Plus, with the split bills, its only fair that we all commit to off grid for financial reasons. Say one house heats off wood, the residents wake up to a 55 degree house every morning cause the furnace burnt out. have to start a fire, move wood, change ash buckets, and keep the fire loaded all winter long. And another house has a furnace where they don't have to do anything to stay warm. Everyone pays equally, but the house with the furnace costs us all more. So we all need to work to get these homes off the grid for financial affordability, environmental sustainability, and equality. Many children have been raised in homes that heat with wood, veg oil, etc... and also get their water off the grid. We will most likely be keeping our electricity on the grid for a long time due to costs of getting that off the grid. Either way, this process of heat and water will take a few years. So chances are, you could get into a home with a furnace and live like that for a year or two or three before switching to heat, giving your newborn a bit of time to grow up and become less in need of a furnace. Also if you lived in a home that was converted to off grid heat, and chose to run the gas furnace and were willing to pay that bill on your own, independent of the community, i'm sure we could approve such a thing and work it out. Q: Buy in? A: We are seeking equal owners of a community. Many communities like ours have a buy in of a few thousand, up to hundreds of thousands. We have no buy in, but we have a tiered system of residency before an individual becomes an owner. since when someone does become an owner, they legally own an equal share of our community as everyone else, and we are giving them a portion of our own shares, they do not just start off as an owner. If an individual is interested in moving, in, we all meet and find out if it might be a good match. The person is then offered a trialship. This is a short period of a few weeks to initially get to know each other. If all is well (trial can pay their bills, doesn't flip out and break things, cause problems, etc... we all get along, and they chip in equal shares of work) then we offer the person (couple in your case) an internship. This is just a longer period of time to get to know each other (things are easy to work out in just a few weeks, but it really takes time to make sure it works, kinda like "seeing each other", "dating", etc., before marriage in a relationship).
