Institute
A new and revolutionary model of housing. One woman's life, and the financial model it produced, in one book by Stina Kerans.
Stina Kerans has spent her life asking why people who work all their lives still cannot own their shelter, and why so many grow old lonely. This book is her answer: the story of how she found it, and the model itself, set out in full.
Published in 2021 by OffGridz Pty Ltd and edited by Elizabeth Jewell Stephens, it runs to 318 pages in three parts. It was launched at the Canberra Yacht Club on Stina's seventieth birthday, 27 February 2021.
Paperback PDF The audiobookIn short, our society is formed by the way we house ourselves.
Stina Kerans, Can't Buy Property?
Why house prices have outrun wages for a century, and why this decade matters. Bernard Lietaer on money as yang and local trading as yin. Why spending, banking and investing locally keeps wealth in a town. And the ideal village: a dense node, everyone within 300 metres of the hub, food land around the edge.
A childhood filmed for ABC television. Building her own home as a young single mother. Garry, Bill Mollison and the search for a tribe. Finding the Queanbeyan land at Christmas 1980, running one of Australia's first LETS, forty years of setbacks, and the public company formed in December 2014.
The three principles of social sustainability. Shares and a 99 year lease instead of strata. How investors act like a bank and share the developer's margin. What it means for residents, compared side by side with renting and owning. And how to form your own group and start.
Stina's view is that social sustainability comes first: it is the precursor to both economic and ecological sustainability. Three design principles, she writes, are essential to re-weave the social fabric.
She adds a fourth measure: a healthy life needs about six points of contact a day, and a nod on a garden path counts.
Builder, mother, developer, futures trader and the creator of the Sun Villages model. Her practice grew from decades of permaculture, volunteering at Sydney's Wayside Chapel, and years living off grid as a single mother.
Each of those, she says, deepened one conviction: housing must create belonging, not just shelter.
Belonging was more important than belongings.
Design is the loom upon which the social fabric can be woven.
LETS users won't get rich, but neither will they ever be debt slaves.
The elderly also need the young, in order to stay young at heart.
Friends, shareholders and family at the Canberra Yacht Club for Stina's seventieth birthday and the launch of the book. Harry Simon, the company's solicitor, spoke, as did Garry, Elizabeth Stephens, who edited the book, and Mark Spain.
10 min · A film about where you grow old, and why being needed matters.
10 min · A film about where you end up, and the choice the village gives.
4 min · Forty years of regenerative development behind the model.
The book is not legal, medical or financial advice, and says so. Figures in it are stated as at 2021 and are not repeated here. The return the model aims for is a target, never a promise. Nothing on this page is an offer.
