The Great American Pixel

Musings On What It Means To Be An Inchvestor

Yesterday I ran into someone who bought 2 inches of LOVELAND nearly a year ago when we were just starting out, didn’t have any land yet, had the most basic of websites, and were pretty much writing inchvestments down on paper. He was quite pleasantly surprised that we have actually been following through on the project and expressed sincere joy that he had 2 inches that he might interact with or sell in the future. ‘I have a feeling that this could the best investment of my life,’ is an almost exact quote.

This got me thinking it’s time for an update and some musings on what it means to be an inchvestor. As we experiment our way into the future of LOVELAND we try to keep things as open as possible so we don’t back ourselves into a corner of creating expectations that we can’t handle and promises we can’t fulfill, and also so we can respond to cool new opportunities.

A lot of the starting experience has been based on my enjoyment of buying a penny-sized parcel of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood farm through the Lincoln’s Land project, and wanting to advance upon that system while keeping similar baseline expectations. They make it clear that while you can visit and look at the land, you don’t own any piece in particular, you can’t modify the land, and you can’t resell your land to other people. Now LOVELAND lets you do all those things and adds an online component, but despite the limitations of Lincon’s Land, I still enjoyed getting my deed in the mail, and I like that my mind moves to the land whenever Lincoln is brought up. In short, I got my money’s worth.

Inchvestors in LOVELAND are of course free to visit their inches, but, again, they can also find exactly where their parcels are in particular on the website and in person, can build on or otherwise modify them, and can also resell them to other people (although we currently don’t offer a formal system for that through the site, since the foundational intent wasn’t to create a micro speculation system). As an inchvestor, you don’t have to do any of those things, but you certainly can.

As of right now, LOVELAND has around 800 inchvestors. That is, around 800 people own 1 square inch or more of land in Detroit within the project. By within the project I mean that the inch deeds are not filed with the City of Detroit. LOVELAND owns the land with the city, and then keeps track of who has what space within our Inchvestor Database. This clears inchvestors of having legal liability with the city, and makes our relationship more flexible, but it does not make the ownership worthless or fictitious or dada. It’s probably useful to think about the inches as shares in the project, and within specific properties within the project. We take these shares very seriously.

LOVELAND’s first property, a 10,000 square inch microhood named Plymouth, is completely sold out to nearly 600 individuals, and a concrete form has been poured on the property that mirrors the online map. While there’s no more space on that property, it’s possible to approach any inchvestor on the grid and see if they’re interested in selling all or some of their inches. Right now that’s between the owner and the buyer, and if we hear from both parties saying that a deal had been made, we’ll update the map accordingly. And of course it’s also possible to give your inches away as gifts to other people. Just let us know who and we’ll update the map.

LOVELAND’s second property, a 50,000 square inch microhood named Hello World, is in the process of filling up, and also in the process of locking down its defined physical location in Detroit (we hope to have that done in the next 2 weeks and are currently jumping through some hoops). This is a case of shares in the project waiting to be embodied (blast from the past: when the project first started, inches were called Future Inches before we had any land, something we continued with Ghost Inches :-)).

Again, as we move forward we necessarily need to keep aspects of the project open-ended as there are so many variables involved, not only for today, but as we move 1, 5, 10, 100(?) years into the future, or however far it goes. But the thing that you can hang your hat on as an inchvestor is that your inchvestments are counted, stored, tracked, all of that, and that your land shares either already have or will manifest themselves tangibly in Detroit. What happens along the way is an adventure, or an inchventure as we say. And oh what an inchventure it shall be, with ups and downs. Look no further than the crime that happened on Plymouth last week which thwarted our effort (at least for now) to add a service to stream live images of the land online (this is why we can’t have nice things! :-)). And it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that in the future there will be disruptive events. For example, maybe one or more of our properties will have to lift-off spaceship style from where it sits right now and alight its inchy passengers elsewhere in the city for any number of unforeseen reasons.

My baseline hope for inchvestors is this: that as a starting point, however much land you buy in the project will return to you that amount of joy or interestingness; that your micro property will become a gateway for new relationships, both with other neighbors on your property from wherever they are in the world, or others in Detroit; that your inchvestment will increase your awareness of and interest in other things happening in Detroit now that you’ve got some ownership in the city, which may segue to you supporting other larger things happening here; and that it generally expands your mind a bit, raising interesting questions and new ideas, and entertaining you along the way.

Beyond that, we’re working hard on creating tools to manage your micro properties online that we believe will not only give more and more compelling ways to interact with your land and microhood, but that can also be applied to land of much larger sizes, potentially creating a new kind of social map for community interaction and the development of land and places on the human-scale.

And as time moves on and many sorts of things happen on LOVELAND properties, do I think its possible that by the nature of their specialness that individual inches or plots of sold out properties can be re-sold by inchvestors for hundreds or thousands or even millions of dollars? Of course I do! Believe me, life is long, the future is unwritten, and way crazier things have happened. Nothing is guaranteed, but we hope you enjoy your inchvesment along the road to whatever comes.