AP piece on the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

The AP wrote a article and made a video about the physical archive of the Internet Archive.   This is our storage system for millions of books that I wrote about on the Archive Blog.   We hope to expand it to music and movies as well.

Onward!

 

 

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Growing Our Own Food

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Leveraging recent developments, I believe we can build small-scale farms that are low-labor and low-water-usage that grow enough chickens, fish, and vegetables (not sure about grains) to feed many families.   Small scale meaning less than 1 acre and low labor meaning it does not take over your life.   A gentleman’s farm that actually feeds a community.

This can bring us healthier food and lifestyle as well as a sense of food security.   Serving as a model and example for others in case of a food shock, some bottom-up research and development could help society in the case of need.

I wrote an essay about my researching the subject.

But please read and comment.   Word File, PDF, other formats.

http://www.archive.org/details/GrowingOurOwnFoodAndOtherEssays

aquaponics

 

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What should be the school year be for custom schoolers?

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Our family has built a “custom school” around our 14 year-old child with hired teachers, and it is working out fantastically well.    He is learning more than his former classmates, according to his former teachers that have evaluated him.   He is excited about reading a wide range of books, which is new.   And I am glad he is learning the beauty of mathematics, not just the mechanics he was taught before.    Together we decided to continue for another year at least.

But what should we do about the school year?   Should we match his older brother’s high school schedule?    We started out the year that way, but have changed.   He now takes a class whenever both he and his teacher is in town, and we feel free to have him take trips with us all through the year.   Right now is now at a 2 week birder camp which he saved his allowance for.   The teachers have been thankfully flexible with our schedule, and it we are flexible around theirs.    So we have adopted a flexible schedule that has many weeks off each year, but not all gathered together.

This has allowed us to go on trips together, for his teachers to take him on field trips, and for him to stay learning more consistently.    A language teacher complained that the summer months set students back by many weeks.

There is value to having time off to play, relax, and develop hobbies, but is our spreading this out throughout the year a better course?    It is too early to tell, and I am not quite sure how we will be able to tell, but our son does not seem to feel that he is being cheated out of summer vacation– he is getting trips and independence sprinkled throughout the year.

If anyone has any experience with this, please comment here, or write to us.

 

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Really Owning our Homes: Home/Land Security

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

What if most people owned their homes free and clear, in other words, debt free?   If we were renting, what if the rent were less than 1/2 of what it currently is because we only paid for upkeep and taxes, and not debt payments of the owner?    With most of us paying 30-60% of our income in rent or mortgage, this would be a huge subsidy.   Better than that, it would give us a sense of security.   If we owned our homes, if bad times hit and we lost our jobs then we could settle back into our house, reduce our expenses and pull through.   Maybe we could call it Home/Land Security 🙂

People are happier when they are not scared of losing something they can not afford to lose.    Losing one’s house to foreclosure means your credit is a wreck, usually one is out of money, and you have to leave your house– a bad combination.    Having to move apartments to a less expensive part of town possibly means changing jobs or schools or neighborhood friends that could support you.   Starting over another notch down can hurt a great deal.    This essay attempts to show a way to really own our homes.

The key to home security is to pay a small part of our income for our housing.     That way when we have a dip in our income we do not have to leave our home.

At this point, the reader might be saying: “well that would be nice, but that is just not my reality.”   And unfortunately, that is correct, that is not most people’s realities.   So we need a new reality.    We need to fix a system, or we need a new system, in which our housing is not a dominant cost in our lives.     How do we do this?   Lets find the cause.

The cause is perpetual debt financing of housing.   Let me explain.    The rent or mortgage we are paying is mostly interest payments on debt.   This is because most mortgages are for 30 years, and most Americans move before 7 years.    When they move, they get a new mortgage that resets the 30 year clock, and they start paying interest again.    The United States government encourages us to just pay interest and never own by giving a generous tax deduction called the Mortgage Interest Deduction.    If we are renting, then most of our rent is going towards the owners mortgage, so again this is just debt financing of housing.

It is perpetual debt payments because people do not do what our ancestors did: build a house as we could afford it, and then pass it on to the children.    We now move and the only way we could afford to buy a house is to take out a mortgage.   A mortgage we are very unlikely to ever pay off.

Even we were the statistically odd ones that does pay off their mortgage, once the house is sold, it will likely be sold to someone that can not afford to pay cash for it and it will again be a debt burden to someone.     Requiring that people not move for 30 years and pass on their house to their children does not seem like a good solution.    Lets try another.

Solution

What if any particular house is paid off once and then stays paid off?  What if we fixed the system such that a mortgage, if one exists, is passed on to the next owner on the same terms until it is paid off, and then a new mortgage can not be placed on the house?    Then owner of brand new house would slowly pay off the cost of building of the house, and once that is done, then all subsequent owners would just pay for the upkeep.    The advantage is that the cost of ownership would be much less and stay low forever after.   The disadvantage is that the owner does not then put extra money into a speculative investment that then might pay off (or might not depending).   Fortunately there are many other ways to speculate with the money that would be saved from paying mortgage interest.

This would mean that those of us living in 50 year old houses would not pay for the interest and principle of the house.   This would mean that a house would not be an investment for the owner, but rather it would be a place for the owner to live in security.

The original builder of the house would pay the construction costs through a 30 year mortgage as they do today, presumably because the banks would make sure the government does not take away this bonanza system for them.   But those that come later do not have to refinance the house as if it were brand new when it is indeed a 30 year old house.

How do we get there?

Given that almost everyone is up to their necks in debt, how do we change this system?    If we could get cooperation from the government, it would be must easier:  first take away the mortgage interest deduction tax credit system, but even this is unlikely because so many people profit from it.    So if we assume we will get no help from the government, can we still get it to work?

Maybe there is an incentive to those that purchase or already own apartment buildings and homes to commit to passing on the mortgage and not putting on new debt.    The mechanics of how one prevents any future owners from putting new debt on the building is doable I am told by lawyers, so lets assume that it is possible.

In fact there are those that take the debt off of houses and keep them off– such as universities sometimes for their faculty and churches for their pastors.   These are organizations that think long term.    Is it possible to find incentives for individuals to also think long term where the benefits will come to those that come after them?    I believe there are.

One incentive can be a lower cost to purchase the house in the first place.   An informal poll by Jordan Modell, who is exploring setting up a credit union for the Internet Archive found that if one were offered a 20% discount on a house then people would give up the possible future upside on selling the house.    This 20% might come from a community foundation could see it as in grant for the future, or even structure it as a long term debt that gets paid back as an extension of the mortgage.

Another incentive could be to a foundation that wants to endow an organization or a set of organizations with inexpensive housing for their workers such as teachers or workers in public benefit non-profits.    This way a foundation could do a cash calculation to find that this form of investment is an enduring way to benefit a cause that could rival putting an endowment in the hands of investors.

There could even be some people that just decide that it is the right thing to do, and put this “no new debt” restriction on their property voluntarily.    Maybe the house or apartment building could be named after them forever as they are giving a gift to all future residents.   This, I believe, can be tax deductable if the entity that will watch over the “no-lien” restriction is a non-profit and therefore could be seen as a donation to that non-profit.

The government could help by taking away some of the bank benefits like the mortgage interest deduction which helps prop up house prices, or even offer a tax benefit for those that donate any future upside on their home investment.    But we do not have to wait for the government to start getting rid of debt on our houses once and for all.

The point is– there are ways that people can own their own homes, really own them, and have the security that comes with that.

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Structural Change for the Public Benefit: A Lesson from Open Source Licenses

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Forty years ago there was a political agenda in the US and much of the world that had merit:  fix the issues of ecology, control the expanding power of the multi-national corporations, regulate or phase out nuclear technologies, address the population explosion, and abandon American wars in distant countries.   Then why have we seemed to make either little progress or made progress only to see backsliding?   Change, when we achieved it, does not seem to stick.    Laws were made and then undone.   The Environmental Protection Agency was created and then undermined.  Another example is AT&T was broken apart, just to re-join again.  In the United States we have seen both major parties in power, the electorate evenly split, but little enduring progress on key issues.

I think the answer can be found when we did not achieve structural change for the public benefit.

“Structural change”, in this context, is a re-aligning of forces underlying decision-making.   It has the effect of locking in a change thereby making it difficult to undo.   Structural change to an industry changes how the actors interact and who does what.    Without structural change, things can devolve to their previous status.

“Structural change for the public benefit” would be rule changes on interactions, and these rules are typically set by governments.      But we are experiencing a problem.   Even democratic governments are no longer responding to public interest as one would expect.   This is quite noticeable in the United States.

Equity based corporations, with their unlimited lifetime, can press to restore previous privileges over the course of decades.   Politicians in the United States are influenced by those companies that fund the rising campaign expenses, thus making our laws reflect the interests of the companies that can pay the most.   Long term pressure from companies can reverse laws that were once thought of as progress on some of our agenda.

So if we can not turn to government for setting rules for public benefit, which is fundamentally their role, what can we do?   Turns out there is an example from the technology sector that can hold back some of the corporate forces.

During my career in high-technology the spread of the Internet, Free and Open Source Software, and the World Wide Web have had large scale impacts on industry and culture.    But the openness of the Internet is looking shaky based on the failure to secure government support for “net neutrality” thereby allowing infrastructure control to be dominated by a few large corporations.     If allowed to run its course, a few companies can determine what new services will be introduced on what terms.    This will mean that distribution can be controlled as in the days of the private railroad companies in the United States before Anti-trust legislation broke them up and lead to regulation.

The World Wide Web, an system based on open protocols also has implicit rules of good behavior that has allowed it to grow. In the last 6 years, Google has come to dominate a key unregulated component, search, and then break some of the implicit quid-quo pro between the search engines and websites– a balance where sites would allow to be indexed in return for search services directing users to that site.    Google will index others by “crawling” the site and keep the content on their servers for purposes beyond search, and prevent other search engines from crawling their content sites such as Google books and youtube.    Other search engines that try to download Google books automatically are locked out, and the same with those trying to index YouTube. So the World Wide Web has not effective regulation to prevent dominant players from hijacking the system.

Free and open source software, however, has an idea that might lead it to have a very long life despite corporate interests interrupting government or fair markets.

Central to free and open source software are licenses which, in turn, are based on copyright.    When copyright was expanded to envelop everything expressed in the United States in 1976 via a radical rewriting of copyright law, the effect was an enclosure of ideas.   This law granting monopolies to those that never had it, never expected it, nor in many ways wanted it.   But because everything expressed was suddenly controlled by someone, it caused communities based on sharing to break.   The first dramatic one was in software with the Lisp Machine operating system ceasing to be a community project and an object owned by MIT, which it then sold to a corporation.    The result was the software, which was the combined efforts of hundreds over the course of years, died with the short lived company, and one of the authors, Richard Stallman, set out to find a way to keep this waste from happening again.   He invented a system-within-the-system– he called it copy-left.    It as a set of sharing rules that had the effect of re-establishing some of the freedoms we had before the 1976 copyright law.    These sharing rules are fascinating and have been very successful, but the key point here is that a “structural change for public benefit” without government help.

The “structural change for public benefit” brought about by the Free and Open Source licenses and the movement were dependent on the government having made monopoly restrictions very strong.    These licenses used the system against itself in a way that a whole industry to, in effect, voluntarily rewrite law.    This was painful and slow, but showed it was possible.   This system is robust because it only depends on strong monopoly restrictions.   If these restrictions were repealed by the government, then we would have most of the freedoms that have been re-established by this scheme.    So it works either way.

This is not to say it is desirable.   It is much more desirable to have a government that is responsive to public interests.   But since this seems to be receding at least in the United States, it is helpful to know that structural change can be enacted that provide relief from extreme laws by leveraging these laws.

In another article, I will suggest we can create enduring public benefit in housing by leveraging this approach to structural change.

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Housing Trust: Leveraging Free and Open Source Software Ideas to Improve Housing

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

Idea

What if an individual homeowner could designate their house to become and then remain a debt-free house and forever serve a particular community, such as non-profit workers?

Free and Open Source Software Inspiration

This is inspired Richard Stallman’s Free Software idea that lead directly to both Open Source software and Creative Commons.    His approach relies on a background of restrictive laws, in his case copyright law after the passing of the radical 1976 rewrite which made everything expressed copyrighted and effectively forever.   Stallman’s brilliant insight in 1983 was that since the government made all expressed ideas subject to ownership, those owners could put covenants on their use.    His covenant was to voluntarily give up some of the privileges of the monopoly ownership.   This was not needed before the law became so restrictive, but became needed because the community nature of writing software became precarious (the world lost the Lisp Machine Operating System, for instance, which caused Richard to invent Free Software, but this is a longer story).   His ideas spread to every nation and now a very large percentage of all software used is Free or Open Source.

What if homeowners could forever benefit in the same way that software writers were helped by Free and Open Source Software licenses and create communities where helped by Creative Commons licenses?   Here is how this could work.

The Problem with Housing Debt

At this point, most houses are put back under mortgage every time it is sold.   Since houses are sold every 6 years, on average, and mortgages are typically 30 years long, houses can stay under mortgage debt forever.   Also, the owner is mostly paying interest rather than principal in the first 6 years, so when the house is sold, the owner must pay as much money to get out of a house as they put in.  Therefore house prices must go up continually if have the owners are not to lose money.   This is not only unlikely and unstable, it becomes a burden on future generations with increasing debt on old houses.   So instead of buying and owning a house outright, most people owe a monthy mortgage payment.   This has many of the insecurities of rent, so that if a person loses their job or has a medical emergency, then they can lose their house through foreclosure.   And losing one’s house through foreclosure is more painful than moving out of a rented house.    Also, since the market adjusts to what people can pay each month and this stays fairly stable, the price of the house is largely determined interest rate.   If the interest rates go up and down from 6% (1965) to 14% (1985) and them back to 4% (2005) , then the price of houses fluxuates wildly which causes all sorts of havoc.    All in all, it seems like a bad idea to have most houses under debt.    What if we can get some houses out of this?

Using the Free Software idea, what if homeowners could voluntarily take their house out of the perpetual debt cycle and therefore secure a home that people can own outright?   This would be a sacrifice to those first owners, but some might see it instead as an investment in the future.

Possible Benefits from Debt-Free Housing

Actually, there has always been debt-free housing such as pastor’s houses, student dormitories, fraternities, and some university faculty housing.   Also, a hundred years ago, mortgages, if they existed were short, and people paid them off.   But this is now the exception.     The idea here is to make it easy to free houses from debt on a distributed and grass-roots way without requiring being part of a large institution.

  • Quality student housing, such as the cooperatives around many colleges,
  • Support teachers, non-profit hospital workers, or other public benefit workers in a community that may be priced out of living near where they work,
  • Enduringly affordable housing for low-income people that is owned not rented,
  • Housing for retirees so they can stay in their communities as their income drops,
  • Quality housing for single parents, or other needy populations.

How to Permanently Free Houses from Debt

I can think of two approaches for homeowners to create debt-free housing , one is to have a non-profit have an ownership interest in the house, and this is explored in other posts on this blog.    Another is to put binding restrictions on the title and file it with the county.  This needs more investigation, but here is how it might work:

An owner of a house can deed a house to become a “Trust House” by adding a standard document (“Deed of Trust”) the title of the house filed with the government.   A new non-profit Housing Trust organization, I believe is needed to help administer this system.  This could have a volunteer board elected from former owners of Trust Houses.

Required Covenants in the Deed of Trust:

  • Governance:
    • Owner of this Trust House agrees to be a Trustee on nearby houses,
    • Trustees for this particular house are the geographically nearest Trust House owners, say 11 of them.  This keeps governance local and resilient,
    • The Housing Trust has the right to seize the house if the Trustees determines these Covenants are broken,
    • In case of foreclosure, or not paying taxes…  what happens?
    • Removal or modification of the Deed of Trust can be requested by the Trustees but a larger number of Trust House owners must be involved to  decide what to do, say 23 of them.
  • No New Debt:
    • No new liens may be placed on the house: original mortgage, if any, gets passed on as-is or same terms.
    • No material benefit can be derived by one owner as it passes to the next  (no “key money” as they call it in NYC as some rent control apartments are passed on)
  • Optional Covenants can be put on the property by the original purchaser such as: characteristics of the preferred futures buyer, and how often these characteristics are enforced.

Voila!   Houses shed their debt once and for all.

Questions:
Can restrictions like this be placed on titles?
Should this be done with contract law instead?
Can mortgages be transferred?  Do we need special mortgages for this?
How many people would do this?
How can this go wrong and not serve the purposes we are intending?

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Custom Schools with a Class size of 1 or 4

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

This last September, our 13-year-old boy, Logan, rather than return to his San Francisco private school began taking lessons in a custom school his mother and I created around him. I don’t use the word “homeschooling” because that may conjure images of workbooks on the kitchen table with a parent being the major teacher. Logan, in contrast, is being taught one-on-one English and history by a former school teacher, learning Chinese language and culture from a young Taiwanese woman who has tutored before, Geometry from me three hours a week, in addition to a birding class taught mostly to adults, and a science class for homeschoolers at our local science museum, the Exploratorium.

 

I don’t know what to call this educational environment, but “homeschool” does not seem to describe it.  In talking with other parents, we have found that this type of free-form schooling is not uncommon: one parent called himself a “general manager of education” as he explained that he did not teach so much as arrange, and in their case they leveraged the local community and junior colleges with one of their children taking their first college class at age 11. Whatever this school is, Logan is fully engaged, our family is closer than ever, and I am starting to think we are onto something. To put a name on Logan’s new school, I will call it a “custom school.”

 

While we just started this program with Logan, we are encouraged to continue and explore how schooling might be reorganized for some classes of students. This has gotten me thinking about how far this could spread and possibly leveraging the charter school system to build a new type of public school, one that has a class size of 4, but that is getting ahead of myself. Please allow me to explain how I have gotten here.

The rest of this post is in this pdf file, with a supporting spread sheet and article.

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Who Wins from Inflation?

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

“No one wins from Inflation.”    “We must slay the Dragon of Inflation.”  “Inflation hurts everyone.”

Call me skeptical, but I am starting to question statements that start with “everyone” and “no one”.    Let me take a couple of recent examples.    “No one could have seen it coming” was invoked by the early George W Bush administration about the events by al Queda on September 11, 2001, when we later learn that they were warned specifically about this with a major intelligence briefing just a month before.   They hid the major reporting by their department and the briefings from the previous administration and claimed: “No one could see it coming.”    This turns out to be a lie.

Another claim of “No one could have foreseen this” came from the banks when the mortgage bubble popped.    With the failures starting in mid-2007 and leading to a full-out financial crisis in 2008, there were cries of “no one could see it coming.”    Well, this turns out to not be true.    The biggest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, not only saw it coming, but sold its toxic assets to its customers (not disclosing that they were betting against them), and made sure when the bubble burst they not only did not suffer, but they greatly profited.    There were those that saw it coming.    “No one could see it coming” was a lie.

Lets turn to inflation.   The term that I see is “no one benefits from inflation.”   This should set off alarm bells in the same way as “no one could see it coming” but as best I can find it does not, at least not in main-stream public discussion.

But there are winners  when there is inflation:   Debtors win.   More specifically, those with fixed-interest debt win.    If your net worth is negative, in other words, you own more than you own, and the debt is at a fixed interest rate, say now at 4.5%, and then inflation goes up to 12% as it did in the 1980’s for a number of years, then it is a good deal for you.    Granted there are rocky paths and there not everyone’s wages go up, but on the whole prices and wages increase during inflation.  After a few years your cost to replay the debt decreases relative to wages and after several years the debt burdent is largely washed away.   Paying the interest and principle on the loan is then relatively easy as wages increase.

This is what happened with my parents.    They mortgaged themselves to the hilt in the 1960’s with a 6% mortgage, then inflation came back up, and the price of the house went from $65,000 to many hundreds of thousands.   Paying the mortgage became easier, and better yet, they sold the house to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.   My father told me that he made more money on the houses he lived in than the pension he got for from his fortune 500 company.

So inflation does help people, it helps debtors.     And there are many debtors.    If inflation came back now, then everyone with a mortgage would be helped with that debt, at least those with fixed-rate mortgages.    This is most of America.

Why is this not proclaimed?   Well, because there are some losers:   creditors.    So creditors would like there not to be inflation because it would devalue their asset: a loan portfolio.      But who are the creditors now?   There are banks, but more on this in a minute.   There are also individuals: those with fixed savings.   Many of these are those that made money off of real estate when the last round of inflation came through.    So this arguing against inflation comes across as knowing hypocrisy from this segment.

A major creditor would be the banks that made many of the loans in this country: mortgage banks.   But it turns out that those banks now sell over 90% of those loans to a couple of tax-payer backed banks:  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.    These special banks, it turns out, now own most of the mortgages in the United States, so they stand the most to lose from an increase in inflation.    But since they are owned by the taxpayers, and most taxpayers have mortgage debt, and since taxpayers vote for those that control Fannie and Freddie…  Wouldn’t it be in American’s best interest to increase inflation therefore lower their debt burden?  Since the private banks  passed off the inflation downside to the taxpaper by passing on credit risk, the banks would not be against this.

So why has it not happened?   Well, when it does, I am sure there will be a major cry:  “No one could have seen it coming.”

 

 

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Pay it off once, and never again

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

From a house's point of view, it must seem odd to have to be paid off again and again as if it were being rebuilt anew every few years.    A house could be built and then paid off, then enjoyed by those that get to live in her and take care of her– maybe passed down, maybe sold to new owners.    But this is not how it works.

A house is built, slapped with a 30 year mortgage (at least these days), and the owners generally move out before the 30 years (seems on average after 6 years, so they do not even get beyond paying interest).  The new owner then gets to start again– take on a new 30 year mortgage to pay it off.    But again, they don't get to pay much beyond the interest, and the house is not paid off as it is passed to the new owner.

But even after 30 years of this, the house should be paid off, but it isn't– because the mortage keeps getting renewed.    Even houses that are 100 years old, they are not paid off.  From the bank's point of view, the full principle now has to be paid yet again.    Kind of a Ground Hog Day, but a nasty one.

I do understand the counter argument– the owner gets to try to get as much as they can from the next owner, and this is what the market will bear.

But maybe, we have orchestrated “the market” in a perverse way.    “The market” is just made up.  It is a human artifice.   It is buttressed with government subsidies (like the home mortgage deduction and Fannie Mae) to make it what it is.   Thirty year mortgages are just made up, so we can make up something else.

I propose we create incentives to pay off a building once and keep it paid off.   If we did this, then used houses would cost much less than they do now.    The original owners get to live in a new house and slowly pay it off.

At least we can start this without a radical reshifting of our tax and banking system by creating debt free housing.     I believe we experiment in the small, but create a model that could catch on.    It would really be embraced when we get tax and law structures to reinforce the idea of Debt-Free Housing, but at least we can get started now.

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Can the Home Mortgage Deduction Help our Public Benefit Housing System?

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Brewster Kahle

The idea of our Public Benefit Housing system is to have a apartment blocks bought by non-profit organizations which take out mortgage on the property which it then pays off and never refinances.   Then the units are rented and some are subsidized to help benefit employees of non-profit entities.   What this seems to leave out is a tax benefit that is offered by the United States federal government to those households paying interest on mortgages.

Can this tax structure be of benefit to those living in this public benefit housing system?    I don't know, this would take a tax attorney or something, but here is how it could work.

If the people in the units were actually those that owned the mortgage, then part of the “rent” they were paying would go directly to paying the mortgage interest.    Indirectly this is what is happening– the fees paid by the residents is going into a pool and much of that is going to pay the mortgage.    But if it were structured such that the occupants were actually on the mortgage document for as long as they were an occupant, then that part of their rent might be able to be applicable to the home mortgage deduction system.

As I understand how the home mortgage deduction system works is that a person can deduct from their income the amount they pay on interest on their home mortgage.   This means that if you make $50,000 a year and pay $10,000 a year in mortgage interest (and it is mostly interest most of the 30 years), then your new income from a federal tax point of view is $40,000.    Thus the difference in taxes paid might be 28% of the $10,000, or $2,800.   Thus the government is offering a subsidy to mortgage holders of the incremental tax rate or currently about 28%.   This can be seen as a decrease of the cost of holding a mortgage by almost 28%.

Can we fashion our Public Benefit Housing system to take advantage of this?   Can people that live in the apartment system be on the mortgage for the purposes of getting this deduction?    This might take a flexible credit union, or it might take flexibility on the part of Fannie Mae, the quasi-government entity that buys most mortgages from the banks.    But if this is possible, then this has the benefit of making the “rent” in the apartments be less expensive to the tenants that pay taxes.      Unfortunately it also makes it more beneficial to keep a mortgage going by remortgaging even if it is not needed, which will benefit competitors that do not have a mandate to escape debt when they can, but at least there might be some benefit.

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