THESIS ETC.

“[Community Land Trusts, or] CLTs are associated with their American and European varieties, where they function as real estate developers— nonprofit and affordable, but developers nonetheless. Favelas, however, do not require property development, but rather a formalization of their existing housing and community stock. This begs the question: can favelas be retrofitted as CLTs? It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes. Starting in 2001, the Caño Martín informal settlements of San Juan, Puerto Rico, fought the gentrification of their communities. Today, the Caño is a widely studied example and shows that CLTs can effectively provide formal, titled ownership without the risk of gentrification, while building on the community’s existing social attributes.”

Long before the founding of Rome, the Etruscans measured time by something called the saeculum. A saeculum spanned from a given moment until the last people who lived through that moment had died. It was the extent of firsthand memory for human events—the way it felt to be there then—and it reminds us of the shallowness of American history. Alarmingly few saecula have passed since students of the Enlightenment took human slaves. We are approaching the end of the saeculum of people who remember what it feels like to be entered into total war. The concept is useful because it helps announce a certain kind of loss: the moment when the lessons that cannot be captured in the record disappear.

The saeculum that shaped the current Bay Area started soon after the Second World War and will end shortly. The lessons that it offers should be clear to anyone who lived across that span. To have grown up through San Francisco’s recent history is to be haunted by the visions of progressivism that did not end up where they were supposed to, that did not think far enough ahead and skidded past the better world they planned. It’s to be paranoid about second- and third-order social effects, to distrust endeavors that cheer on sensibility more than sense. It’s to have seen how swiftly righteous dreams turn into cloister gates; to notice how destructive it can be to shape a future on the premise of having found your people, rather than finding people who aren’t yours. The city, today, is the seat of an atomized new private order. The lessons of the saeculum have not stuck.