What if one of us

little-succubus:

Bought a piece of property out in the middle of nature and set up like an otherkin retreat?

That would be pretty cool.

But it wouldn’t just be otherkin.  More like…anyone who wanted to get away from the world and just be surrounded by the sheer awe-inspiring beauty of undiminished natural beauty of the earth.

And every year there would be a big otherkin convention held there.  Urgh.  I would love it.

It would indeed be pretty awesome. But this is another one of those nice ideas that takes more planning to come off well than it might look like on the surface. Don’t get me wrong - I was wistfully browsing land listings just yesterday, as it happens, since this seems to me the ultimately best way to solve my problems with not finding a good site for a gather: buy my own, be it ever so humble. But still—

There are nature retreats and such out there, of course, which could be used as models. Money, as always is a major obstacle; few otherkin, taken alone, will have the financial resources to be able to take this on, even given that land is cheaper just about everywhere else in the US (I dunno about the rest of the world) than it is where I am in the SF Bay area of California.

So, assuming one person well-off enough to do this cannot be found, we might try to pool money. All right, then who decides where to buy the land? Whose names will be on the deed, and how will that be decided? (Or would we attempt to create a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to own it - uh oh, there’s that dirty word, organization, and then of course still such an organization has to have someone or someones in charge of it.) How will the funds be managed and accounted? (Because it had better be accounted for transparently, or everything could go very sour very quickly.)

There are also questions of annual property taxes and insurances. Who pays for them? How will they get that money? Retreat/nature centers usually support themselves by charging groups to use the facilities, otherwise with donations. Some struggle to stay afloat unless they invest in building fancy infrastructure that is attractive for groups and for which they can charge substantial fees. Even if there is enough initial money to purchase the property outright (rather than requiring mortgage payments), there are sill ongoing costs.

And for a piece of otherwise-pretty-wild land to be useful to people in two-legged bodies, you need to give thought to two major issues at least (there are others, but these are biggies), even if you have no plans to build any structures:

1. How they will get drinkable water? Is there a water district or well? Or piping (and possibly treating) from a creek or river? How is that paid for or maintained? Each person hauling in their own gallons of water when there is an event is possible, but it’s a pretty big pain in the butt - water is heavy and takes up a lot of space (and you usually need more than you think you do!).

2. What will they do for toilet facilities? Few people are prepared to poop in the woods (and there are right and wrong ways to do that even if you must). If sewer or septic are involved, again there are maintenance to do and upkeep costs. You can rent porta-pots, of course (Walking the Thresholds used to have to do this), but it’s just something that needs to be thought about.

It could, hypothetically, be done. But I would hate to see anyone go underwater financially because they didn’t think through how much money would likely have to keep feeding into it, or for there to be big fights and splits over property rights and taxes and all those issues. It’s the kind of thing that can make starry-eyed friends go it into saying “yeah! let’s do it!” and come out mortal enemies blaming each other for everything.

(via kini-nate-deactivated20120806)

  • June 5
  • , 2012
  1. silveth reblogged this from salfarro and added:
    Exactly; I just was mentioning that that’s what I was pointing out to little-succubus in one of my earlier reblogs, that...
  2. sundragonbeast reblogged this from raijuu