06041 Selecting a place to live

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. — Wendell Berry, from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine

Geography and transportation have enormous impact on lifestyle design issues.

To date, we’ve used money and energy to overcome distance. This allows us to live wherever we think we want to live, while working wherever we think we want to work (or attend school). We don’t think about either of those locations relative to other destinations in our life like shopping or entertainment. We just please ourselves about where we live relative to where we work and if we can pay the bill, we figure that’s all that’s required of us.

Alas, the money and energy we spend on transportation do not account for all of the costs that result from our lifestyle desires to live and work and play anywhere that pleases us, irrespective of the geography and access issues.

The problem is that those costs haven’t gone away. Other people pay them. The ecology pays them. The future pays them. Our circumstances increasingly constrain our ability to evade the accounting of our own personal responsibility for these externalized costs. My first tank of gasoline cost me twenty-five cents a gallon. Those days are gone forever.

Should we decide to take the permaculture ethics seriously, we must be more prudent when it comes to using money and energy to overcome distance. As we design our lifestyle for a world of peak oil, climate instability, political criminality, and economic irrationality, we seek patterns of sufficiency that will support our good life strategies. We leave behind gluttony and arrogance. The utility of those patterns is long past.

When the time comes to choose a place to live and work, begin by developing a list of all the places you go. For each destination, you need this information:

How often do you go there?

Why do you go there? (Think big classifications, like work, entertainment, shopping, education, worship, school, recreation, etc.)

Rank the importance or desirability of the location in the greater scheme of your life.

Plot the locations of these destinations on a map.

Compare this network of your destinations with the local transportation infrastructure — streets, bus routes, light rail systems, streets and highways, whatever is there.

Look for the sweet spot — a place to live with great access to the destinations and geographies of your life. If travel is not avoidable, look for good public transportation connections with your destinations. If no public transportation is available (which is all too common these days), make your best choice. It may not be the perfect choice. It may be the best of a series of bad choices. You shouldn’t blunder into a bad situation by accident or inattention.

You will have maximum freedom in matters of geography if you rent instead of buy. Renting is one way to finesse a series of bad choices among the geographies of your life. If you rent, you can continue to look for a place to live that is a better fit for your life’s geographical destinations. Or you could look for a job that is closer to your home. Or you can do both at the same time — change your job and change your dwelling when the right situation comes up. In general, my advice is to not buy until you’ve found the sweet spot in the geographies of your life.

In your design plans don’t forget that one way to finesse the “work location” issue is to start your own business, either by yourself or in conjunction with others as a partnership, limited liability company, or worker-owned cooperative.

These are important and critical decisions. At stake is two whole months of work every year (cf. the calculation in 06021 regarding commuting times) and your personal responsibility to care for people, care for the planet, and care for the future.