Heart breaking to see places like this close shop. I’ve seen first hand how many people learn new skills from the kind of hands on community learning that these

Heart breaking to see places like this close shop. I’ve seen first hand how many people learn new skills from the kind of hands on community learning that these places can offer. If anyone has the finances to turn this around I encourage you to do it. I can’t offer that, but this situation reminds me that things don’t have to be this way. There are alternative land use strategies that hold land in trust for the use of communities so that land use doesn’t have a monetary cost associated with it, or costs are managed as a community. Most prominent in my mind is the way the city government of Vienna Austria buys land and builds housing to keep prices low. We absolutely should have community spaces for our communities, but our notion of land as a private investment makes land super expensive, and in an unequal society regular people can’t afford commoditized land prices. Instead we all end up working as hard as we can to meet ever rising rents. But it doesn’t have to be this way.