Dr. David Martin Explains How We Avoid The Foreclosure Wave Coming & How We Can Re-Imagine Retail To Create A Thriving Society

This idea is brilliant! 

We have to start thinking differently and acting differently.

You can see more about Dr. David Martin and James Purpura’s work at wethepeople.buzz

Video Transcript

And listen, we can wait. And this is this point of this conversation for me, we can wait and let a centrally planned failure happen.

I mean, that’s an option, we can just wait and just know what we know.

We can see the handwriting on the wall this comment this not even handwriting on the wall. That’s a bad analogy.

This is like a billboard, you know, on freeway 10 in Southern California, like, you can’t help but see this one, right?

There’s $4 trillion of dry powder held by financial institutions who have every now March inability to foreclose on business, to foreclose on mortgages to foreclose on property, foreclose on whatever they want, and essentially do a massive, massive, massive land, productivity power grab.

That’s the condition that we’re in. But I have an idea.

My idea is that we, the people start thinking about what it would look like to actually repurpose the infrastructure that is currently targeted for this predatory move.

And I’m gonna just take us down a little journey just for an example.

What if we, the people decided to start building businesses that in fact, took essential technologies, essential services, essential products, the things that we value, and started repurposing these things, so that they were not for closable. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how much land is occupied by a shopping mall.

But the ratio of built developed land to parking surface area is actually insane.

It’s sometimes as much as five to six to one where you have parking space to build it, which means that most shopping malls are mostly parking spaces.

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the value of the parking space obviously, is really high when you need to have people coming and going from those places.

But the value of that goes down considerably when people aren’t parking there anymore. Because it turns out now it’s just a bunch of empty land.

And I think that one of the possibilities is to actually start thinking about how we repurpose the resources that are in fact becoming the derelict components of our society.

And I had a conversation just the other day with somebody, were asked the question, let’s play out a scenario. And let’s go, let’s say four years into the future.

You remember when Orange County was going bankrupt, because a bunch of investors decided to blow up the mortgage market in Orange County?

It turns out that one of the things that we saw fail very early was the infrastructure commitments that are made by municipalities.

And it turns out that one of those big infrastructure commitments is sanitation. Now, most people don’t think about this, we don’t think about the fact that, you know, one of the big challenges that we have, is that we rely on infrastructure all over the place.

And it turns out when systems fail, and when economic systems fail in public sector spaces, one of the things that has the potential of getting hit is things like water, and sewer and sanitation and all these other things.

What if we actually started looking at the things that are going on in our respective areas, the needs that we have that the public sector pays for?

And what if we started coming up with micro ventures and micro businesses, where rather than looking at a shopping mall as a failed retail enterprise, we look at as the beginning of a micro fabrication Center, where we start making things like water filtration systems, like at home power storage systems, like the kinds of things that take we the people and get us off of the dependency wagon before we are forced to accept dependencies we don’t want.

What if every shopping mall that no longer has its gap or its target or its Belk or its JC Penney’s, or its Sears or whatever else, what if that space was turned into a municipal manufacturing center.

And what we do is make things there, whether it is starting off with little things like at home water purification systems or at home sanitation and recycling systems or at home power generation or storage systems or wind turbines or, or little micro turbines to generate little electrical supplies.

I don’t even care what the thing is James, but what if we started using these resources and using them to start building things start having productivity so that we actually have an alternative to the state sponsored distribution of the foreclosure That is on the horizon.

It wouldn’t take much. Because it turns out that one of the things that’s the greatest challenge for starting economies is infrastructure. And it turns out that one of the things we have in abundance is we have tons and tons and tons of infrastructure that has water and sewer and power and all kinds of other things already installed.

And we, in fact, can start thinking about what is it that we can make, that starts training a generation that reintroduces the notion that we do not wait for the world and the technology to come to us, but we start defining what that technology is. And we start using the resources that we have in our communities in a productive and meaningful way.

So that the inevitability of the financial chaos that I’ve just described, when it comes into fruition, we are part of a supply chain, rather than a dependency chain.

Where’s that conversation happening right now?

6:11  

Well, you know, I think I’m going to give somebody give you an example. So my father in law was over the other day, he’s big into hunting and RVs.

And those types of things, right. And so we were having a conversation about, there are people all over the internet, that are improving upon solar power nodes for in storage for RV, so that you can park your RV without running the generator on?

Right, right. And so that technology is all over the internet? And they’re sharing it with each other?

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What if we could invent something like a self sustaining? Either really powerful, you know, solar panel, or even there you go?

How about, let’s figure out how to pull energy out of the air like Tesla did, right?

I mean, like that, that where we could take our own houses off of the system, that that, that we’re on, right?

I mean, just little ideas to make us self sustaining, to make us self efficient. All kinds of things. I mean, when you said, when you said the mall, in the parking lot, what what I actually came around to was I had this idea, I saw like a big giant Farmers Market all around the edge, they go, where people are starting to sell products and services and different things, where we start engaging in commerce that’s going to impact our lives in a in a substantial way.

7:36  

So that’s the point. The point of this is one where I look at this, and for the very first time, one of the things that I think is such a critical conversation.

And I did a quick scan before I came online, and with the exception of one of the projects that we had several years ago in St. Louis, where they started looking at using urban development areas as gardens, and literally gardens for growing fruit and vegetables, all sorts of other things for local consumption.

Because there’s a concept in this country, James, that is been been one that doesn’t get a lot of attention called food deserts, is the the space where in fact, if you actually had infrastructure failure, and enormous number of people would have a difficult time, if not an impossibility of accessing food.

And that’s kind of a really interesting, big existential problem.

What a shopping malls became hydroponic farms, to add to your idea of turning the shopping malls into a farmer’s market, Well, how about you grow stuff during the week?

You know, how many atriums do we have, which could be filled with growing in environments? The point here people is a simple one. The point is that we are going to have a future handed to us, that future is going to be handed to us by a government that actually set us up to be foreclosed upon.

And I No, I don’t want to be sitting there waiting for their brilliant ideas, to be the ideas that are dictated to us living in a rent controlled environment where you are told that you are going to participate in this form of an economy because that’s the form of the economy that state approved.

I want us to be having the conversation about the future we want. And then I want to do something really important, which James is what we’re going to be talking about when we start talking about some of the philosophical topics that we’re going to dive into in other shows. But I want us to look at the world we’re living in differently.

I want us to look at a shopping mall and not see a shopping mall.

I want us to look at property and not see it for what we thought it was.

I want us to look at assets and think about what else they can can be used for.

I want us to think about information and academic centers and research centers and all of the different things that are the ingredients we have in our neighborhood. And I want us to think about them differently. Because if we, the people repurpose those things, we can avert the disaster of having a centrally foreclosed model put upon us.

Bottom line is, I don’t want food surplus. Velveeta cheese for dinner tonight. I drink industrially produced government surplus. Meat substitutes, I do not want hamburger helper.

I do not want anything to be solved for me by the industrial complex that led to the very foreclosure that we’re facing. I want to be part of the architecture that thinks differently about what we have in our neighborhoods, what we have in our communities.

And I want to start thinking differently because we have three years to think differently.

The above video was a clip from one of their recent videos. That full show is below.