Mr. Moderate

Many of us have lived in developments (tracts or apartment complexes) which had “community centers” of some sort or another. Usually, there was a shared pool and a large party room that was rarely used by anybody other than the sales staff who was marketing the concept to prospective new residents. The shared pool is usually popular, as it represents a large cost item that has difficult maintenance requirements and which is safer in a community area than in a back yard with kids.

The idea of “more shared space” is to extend this concept into other areas of our lives where we can achieve economies of scale which result in a higher shared quality of life than any of us can afford otherwise.

As a “for instance,” lets look at the idea of a home theatre system. Take, for instance, the Panasonic high-end home theatre system, which can produce a 50 foot diagonal picture with 10,000 lumens of light. As I write this, the base cost (without options, which you will probably want) is just under $60,000. That price will probably come down, but there is little doubt that such a device will be outside of the reach of all but the wealthiest Americans for the foreseeable future. And of course, the real cost is in the building needed to house such a device. By the time you add the screen and the seats all in a specially-built room, you could easily be looking at the low-to-mid six figures of total cost. For the sake of argument, let us take $200,000 as the total project cost for a home theatre of this type.

Now, if you split that cost over 100 families, and you finance it (there is a building, after all, which represents the majority of the cost), each family’s share could be as little as $20 per month. Now its true that this building isn’t at your personal beck and call at every moment of every day. But it would be there every day and every night for the HDTV shows and DVD movies that are voted “most popular” by the 100 families who are paying for it.

Now, take cable or satellite television. If every one of those 100 families got their own cable TV or satellite TV account, it would cost them between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, depending upon how many movie channels each subscribed to. But how many different channels are all those families actually going to be watching? Won’t roughly 50 of them be watching the 3 to 5 main TV channels for the area? And won’t 25 or 30 of them be doing something other than TV on any given night? The chances are very good that a community of 100 families would need no more than 10 to 20 distinct accounts for cable or satellite TV as they would be more-or-less watching the same shows at more-or-less the same time. Adding TIVO-type recording into the mix raises this to a virtual certainty.

The typical set-top-box with a digital video recorder option has 40 to 80 gigabytes of storage and can record 5 to 10 hours of television shows before the disk fills up and something must be deleted. But we are not limited to just what a set-top-box can hold, as we can easily use personal computers as digital video recorders and direct all of the shows to a common array of hard disk drives accessible to everybody in the community. This means that if I want to watch a noon soap opera at nine in the evening, and fast-forward through the commercials, I can easily do so. My experience with my own family has been that, once we got a DVR option in our set-top-box, it is now a virtual necessity, as we now almost never watch anything other than news at the exact time it is broadcast. (And we almost always fast-forward through the commercials.)

Setting this up on a community-wide basis allows lots of sharing of media content. If we have 100 families each with their own private 60 gigabyte hard drive, each family will have only a few shows recorded and available to choose from. But if we have 6,000 gigabytes in a storage array, all available to all 100 families, imagine how many individual programs can be available for playback on demand. And if all 100 people want to watch the same show, no problem. The file server will buffer the requests and fill everybody’s needs on schedule. Doesn’t this contribute to a greater quality of life for the members of such a community?

Now imagine if you will that all 100 families pool together all of their DVDs into a common lending library that any family can borrow from. This is how we got public libraries almost three centuries ago. Now, as then, the motivation is reduced cost and increased selection (or “increased quality of life,” if you will).

Electronic entertainment isn’t the only shared space function that such a community can engage in. Probably the most important such function is eating. You will note that I made no provisions for cooking or eating facilities in my description of a typical “personal space” area. This does not mean that cooking or eating is prohibited. But the “personal space” area probably has only a small refrigerator and a microwave oven for cooking. That will generally suffice for snacks and eating while not dressed for public areas.

I don’t know where the proper balance is for joint eating. Military installations tend to have one large mess hall where everybody eats (not family members; at least, not generally). University dining tends to be similar. But of course, individual tastes certainly do vary. However, menus at restaurants don’t offer a lot of variety on average. So, I suspect that there are no more than a dozen common meals that most everybody would eat most every day. Or perhaps, a large buffet-style restaurant would do the trick. I’m open to suggestions here.

But even if we avoid the large central dining facility, we can still have several families share a large common kitchen and dining area. While a commercial-quality Sub-Zero refrigerator is beyond the affordability level of most families, it isn’t beyond the shared affordability of several families. Once again, sharing saves cost and improves quality. A large central freezer would allow everybody to share storage costs and save the environment (the efficiency of a commercial freezer is much higher than the efficiency of an equivalent number of home freezers), while minimizing the amount of frozen food stored in individual kitchen areas.

Also, if any “finicky eater” doesn’t like what is being served, they can be sent to shop around at other tables for something they enjoy eating. You can’t do that in a nuclear family environment.

There are many other possibilities for shared family life. A day care center for children is one good example. A large recreation facility with a computer lab for kids (supervised, of course) would be another possibility. And of course, the traditional shared amenities like pool, exercise room, party room, and so forth could all be counted upon to be present in such a community.

And finally, community members can also share access to parking areas, transportation resources, storage facilities, etc., even if some (or all) of those are privately owned or controlled. People living in this kind of a community could be expected to be more responsive to pleas to car pool to save the environment (and money). And neighbors having special skills (like automobile mechanic) could make them available to the community at large at reasonable rates. There is no limit on what can be shared by people who have learned to trust the other members of the community once again. And no limits equates to a large increase in the joint quality of life while controlling or reducing costs for everybody.