Reading up on intentional communities again after two years of abandoning the idea is weird. It has given me a new way to say something I've been trying to say for years about why such efforts in and around Detroit are basically doomed to fail, though: The issue is support. If you're doing any kind of communal activity in a place, you need the active support of at least one of: the Authorities (be that government, police or whatever), the Businesses (big or small), and the Neighbors (general local community or direct on-the-block neighbors). If none of those actively support you BUT at least they don't actively oppose you, that seems like it might be possible too. But if all three are either indifferent or actively against you, no WAY. No group is an island, and especially not when the point of the group is to pool resources and live leaner and more cleverly by building and utilizing connections. And what people -- especially people who haven't lived around here -- don't understand is that Metro Detroit is not just a badly-designed and mis-managed place, but that it's also  a) politically corrupt and hostile to any efforts to do things outside the status quo (check out the city government finding the money to destroy the Cass Corridor Coop or the Catherine Ferguson Academy, even while too broke to keep the streetlights on and over the loud objections of so many people),  b) intensely slanted towards the interests of large, non-local corporations, who are openly hostile to just about everything intentional community efforts stand for (I don't think I really need to support this statement?), and  c) populated by between sixty and ninety percent *factory worker* families, who way more often than not are just as against anything progressive as the most Orwellian cop (a huge issue for many of the volunteer organizations, attempts at CSAs, etc. is the people in the very neighborhoods they're trying to serve or save making complaints against them and trying to get them shut down or thrown out -- those people want the factories and the jobs back, period, and even ignoring the racial issues, they really don't see past the funny-colored hair *at all*).  I literally cannot count the number of plans I've made and participated in -- to buy land here, get cheap houses there, take over an abandoned building or a chunk of overgrown or something similar -- and every single one of them died an early death due to the lack of support, and in many cases the open hostility from one or more of those three key groups. Anyway. Sorry about the negativity -- I'm just missing those dreams lately, and being back in Michigan makes me angry all over again, because there are so many ways in which this place would be ideal for thinking outside the box, but noooo, it's gotta be broke and shitty AND backwards and repressive. (Detroit: Hundreds of acres of empty land and people who are literally shooting squirrels to eat because there are no grocery stores and IT'S ILLEGAL TO HAVE CHICKENS -- and if you DO have chickens, your neighbors will probably complain and call the cops on you, too. GUH.)