Motherboard

Look at the Detroit of today as a primordial urban plasma. Notwithstanding the decay fantasies of a lazy media, the thriving industrial center that was the Motor City is over. Whatever the city is to become—whether it’s some kind of post-urban ruralism, a hotbed for radical redevelopment, or just a much smaller city—is yet unformed. The result is that, in a place from which any and all traditional ideas of urbanization have long since fled, along with roughly half of its populace and their money, anything goes and all are welcome. It is certain that whatever eventually saves Detroit won’t have much to do with anything we’ve seen in an American city.

Enter Loveland, a radical project conceived by a young web developer named Jerry Paffendorf who moved to Motown for, he says, “opportunity.” A bizarre intersection of a Second Life virtual world, a realist Sim City, an art project, a commentary on property ownership and an urban redevelopment initiative, Loveland allows web users to purchase plots of land in square-inch increments on an actual piece of land in Detroit. For whatever reason they want. The initial property, Plymouth, is an anarchy of nearly 550 “owners” spread over about 9,000 square-inches and growing. Though it’s starting small in the most literal sense, the potential for Loveland, and the urban imagination it feeds, is as large as a twilight metropolis waiting to rise up again.

Recently I spoke with Paffendorf from his Detroit home.

Motherboard: OK, first off, I think I get it, but why don’t you explain Loveland in your own words?
Jerry Paffendorf: The idea is to get property and parcel it in non-traditionally sized and priced ways with different themes for what people can do with that property once they have it. The first one that we have is in kind of Second Life fashion. It’s very open-ended and highly imaginative—you buy these square inches and really the fun proposition is you do whatever you want with them. And people ask ‘what can you do with inches?’ That’s the fun of it, I think.

The only terms I’ve spoken of on the site and on [crowdsourced fundraising site] Kickstarter are no feces, no fires, no porn, no hate speech, no things that are otherwise outright dangerous—or the benevolent dictatorship of Loveland is going to have to step in a little bit. But that’s not so different from what you have with property anyway, where you have certain kinds of zoning. You can’t necessarily put a flaming clown on your lawn and have that be OK with the city.

We have about 1,000 inches left as of this moment on a 10,000 inch property. And, this spring a nice, clean weather-durable grid of some material is going to be installed on the property. People are allowed to visit and it will show which space is theirs and they can do whatever they want with it.

Recreation of the Plymouth grid for the Detroit Lives! art show at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit’s Ladybug Gallery (picture by Alan Languirand)

Like what?
The kinds of things people have said that they’re going to do with it are things like install a mailbox on it so that people can send things there, or do like interactive stories—there’s people that want to do augmented reality on top of it, little codes on their inches so that you can conjure things in the space that are not physically present. There’s more traditional ideas like paint it or put little buildings there. There’s some people that got enough space and want to do solar power, put a little generator [on their space] to provide power to anyone else that wants to have power on the grid. A number of wild ideas like that.

Some people treat it fantastically, like it’s a gateway to a concept. Other people take the idea of the property, this small area in Detroit, and write it into stories or games that exist outside of it, but have a conceptual root back to the space. The full range. It’s really fun. Because of the restraints and the size, you come up with fun ideas. It’s like this Twitter kind of real estate: you only have 130 characters and you have to shove a message through this little teeny space we have.

Besides installing the grid, we have a few side projects running alongside. One of them is to mount a 24-hour web streaming camera that will run alongside of the grid. We’ll try to have the property online as soon as possible. As much as possible I want to make these properties accessible to people on the Internet as well as in the city. So [we] can blow up this field in Detroit that, at the moment, obviously doesn’t have a whole lot of value to people. It’s kinda sad.

I look at it as a gateway to many creative projects in the city, and the firmest part of what we’re doing is [Loveland]. My background is kind of coming from working inside of a virtual world. . .

Second Life?
Second Life is like where I did the majority of my work-work. I was gainfully employed at a company called Electric Sheep. That started in 2005, and that was the first kind of an all-star band that got together for Second Life projects, like for bigger money and larger companies. We initiated and went through the whole Second Life curve back in the days where Sony had to have their music island, the NBA had to have their basketball court. And everybody all did their tests and eventually it was like Second Life is slow and clunky and Facebook and Twitter are where the majority of people in the world are going to spend their attention.

So we did that, and for as much as it was not a super-mainstream success, that is what kept it in my attention, all of the kind of metaverse stuff—the virtual worlds, and how those focus your imagination on thinking about the real as an Internet-soaked virtual space too. We have these things in our pockets that can talk to other people and sense location and pull up virtual graphic layers of information on top of the real world. That’s really what captured me. I just loved it. I’m still inspired by that set of ideas for what I’m working on now, just pointed in a very different direction.

The idea [for Loveland] came pretty naturally. I know it’s not traditional land ownership, and I know it’s not land ownership that the city will recognize in a document in an office somewhere. It was like I could buy land and be the sort of bullshit buffer for people. Right now, everything is very simple and in very common English.

Why sell land in such small increments? Could this have practical applications too, beyond parceling out square-inches?
We get requests on both sides of the ball as far as whether [Loveland should be] practical land use or like wild, what-the-fuck kind of land use. One of the things I know I want to do is have a property that people can plant things on, get some organic stuff growing in the ground. I’m [also] very interested in doing a video game that you play online that actually affects a property. One idea is something called ‘Inchwars’ where you battle someone on a mirror of a property and then where people die or where events happen, things actually get placed or accumulate on the land.

The mathematics that we’ve worked out are not dissimilar from virtual goods. The first space is about 4,000 square feet, which is about half million inches, but I’m only doing 10,000. And if you do micropayments and then offer space, actually it can work out quite well I think. You can offer people something that’s fun enough that they want to do it, and they have a sense of ownership of something in the world.

And I can use the money to pour back into the project. You have a $500 property and you add value to it through various fun projects and you can use that money to both make that land desirable and to actually make enough money to build stuff. That’s what we’re working towards. I’ve been bootstrapping it using that Kickstarter site for the last six or seven months. And that’s been my preferred methodology, and not race off and try to get a bunch of money from venture capital and instead let a lot of people be able to have complete creative control so we can try some of these crazy things.

What does the property look like right now?
It’s a big grass field. 8887 East Vernon Highway. It’s essentially just a green field. This grid is going to be physically installed on it in the spring, and it will look like whatever happens there. It maybe doesn’t look to people as a serious development project in Detroit, but in the back of my mind it’s like. . . I have never owned land before, and I had this experience where a friend showed me this web site where you can buy a penny sized plot of land on Abraham Lincoln’s farm that he grew up on in Illinois. And I thought, “cool,” and immediately had a thought in my mind that I’m going to drive there and take pictures and put a flag in it, and it’ll be great. And they had all of these terms on their site that said that you’re not allowed to do anything: you can go look at this field, but there’s no individual plots. I was like whatever, I’m going to do this anyway. And I still loved it, this ownership. I’d never had it before, I’d never gone through all of the hassles to have a deed somewhere signed in my name.

Plymouth grid taped to the floor of Jerry’s studio at the Russell Industrial Center

Why sell property? It’s American, but isn’t the supposedly affordable appeal of property ownership partly what sent the U.S. down the toilet to begin with?
Starting, I knew there’s a great feeling that comes from ownership, and I also knew that it sticks in your head a little bit. Now, whenever I think of Abraham Lincoln, I think, “Oh yeah, my land.” I knew that once people got inches that whenever they see Detroit or even a ruler, their mind is going to go back to the property.

To my mind, it was “OK, there’s a serious problem Detroit is facing because they’re trying to do things with these properties and they’re not doing a very good job.” You hear stories about cheap land, but they’re not really that cheap. And if you buy something, you’ve got to go through this whole hassle by yourself. It’s just a difficult, expensive, time-consuming process and very challenging for a single person to take on by themselves.

One of the innovations here I think is that just as easily as you could buy a bag of virtual fertilizer at Farmville on Facebook, you could have an actual property, even if it is Loveland terms of ownership. That is a way you could make a whole bunch of ownership and redevelopment pretty seamless. We’ve got to find ways to make land ownership more simple, cheap, fun, and social. And then highly creative. You’re not going to build a coffee shop right out of the box, but you are going to do something beautiful and inspiring. As long as people get their heads around this new kind of ownership, I think that’s incredibly valid, an innovation in land use. And it feels like Detroit is crying out for that.

Isn’t this kind of like condo ownership?
Yeah, I guess there’s nothing new under the sun. All these ideas are based on other things I’ve seen before just like applied a bit differently. You know the way the condos are set up I guess it’s similar but not this extreme. If you want to buy a condo, that still involves a lot more time and money. There’s certainly connections between what I’m describing and other cooperative structures, condos and such. There’s a precedent for everything, which is why I think it will work. Because there’s precedent.

It sounds like this could turn into a big real estate board game.
I’m not planning on doing that myself. Like, what if someone wants to buy that whole property, like, ‘I now want that vacant lot because of this cool thing going on and I’m going to give you thousands of dollars above what you paid.’ I’m not that interested in that for the first property, but I was to leave that option open for the Inchvestors. We don’t have any tools up for this now at all, but I will certainly allow if, say, someone buys 12 inches early on for $1 each and then later someone sees that the project is full—I can see a secondary market. I’m not sure. I’m very curious to see how that works out.

I’m not coming from that increased-value proposition, but it would be interesting. I would bet that when it’s full and more people starting hearing about it, I would bet some people would get offers to at least double their money at first. And you know how crazy some of these things can get once they become ‘special.’ When something becomes special and scare, someone could be like ‘Well, shoot, I really want that square foot and nobody’s selling. This guy has it, and that’s worth 5 or 10 thousand dollars to get it because people are looking at it.’

But what if it just happens? What if the Inchvestors just turn it into an ad hoc real estate game?
I think with setting up properties with different themes it would be cool to set something up with that purely in mind. That sounds exciting, sounds like a fun game, sounds interesting to people. I tend to be attracted to ideas as spaces, that don’t have one particular application. And this is one of the things that I really liked about Second Life, is that you could—since it’s such a possibility rich environment — you start building something until it gets to the point where other people want to come in, and then people just make it their own. An idea like that you mentioned, I’d be really excited by that. If this first property turned into that, I don’t think it would be bad at all.

Some of the next ones we’re going to do with have more directed themes. This first one is very anarchic. You don’t know what you’re neighbor’s going to do. Which is cool, but it could lead to unpredictability and chaos and such, which, first off, not everybody likes. And [it] doesn’t always produce the coolest stuff.

Vending machine that dispenses Loveland property deeds

My mom lives on the east side of Detroit, not in a terrible neighborhood, but still one where she likely couldn’t sell her house if she wanted. And that’s the story across the city, and those are very real problems. People are getting trapped by depressed property values. I have to say, from someone in that position, it could seem like you’re making light of the situation.
This comes up fairly frequently. Sometimes people are like ‘what is this doing to save Detroit?’ Really extreme stuff. There is this situation, and people are trying to make their own part of the city and the city in general better. I feel that if there is hard work, new thinking, and just general creativity, you can do positive things without having it explicitly be, like, all of the money is going to some particular charity, or something.

I want awesome, positive, creative things to happen in this city, but it’s not entirely what drives me. [And] I don’t necessarily feel that efforts that are specifically targeted at helping out little pieces always have the biggest impact on making things better.

I don’t think I’m making light of anything here at all. It’s working on top of circumstances that allow wild new land use. There’s the creative conditions to do this here, where there certainly isn’t in most other places. It’s unique that Detroit is built on circumstances that are not ideal. People have asked why I don’t set this up as a non-profit. I’ve worked in non-profits as well, and I know how they’re set up. And they’re awesome. But I prefer the freedom of a for-profit company. I think that if you make stuff fun and new and exciting and you get that energy going, I feel like that can have just as positive an impact, and even more so sometimes.

Why not set this up as something communal?
I think there’s a very simple answer, at first, and that is that I started from nothing and I’m doing what I can. I would like to get there. Literally, I got fired from my job. It was an amazing year and a half of a tree falling in a forest. What my friends and I were doing, by the way, was building a new real-time social layer on the Internet. It was a browser plug-in that allowed you to see which web pages your friends were on. You could see where their cursor was and you could have cursor avatars and you could talk on top of pages. You could build things and leave comments anywhere on the Internet. You could tune into your friend’s layers of the Internet. It was like you and your friends are going onto the Internet together.

In some ways, it was very Second Life-inspired. Your cursor is going to be your avatar, your land is going to be web pages, and then we’re going to have items and inventory and the building stuff is going to be the items and the frames and the pictures that already compose the Internet. That kind of a project.

When I started, I didn’t save any money. We were just spending and working. I was living between New York and San Francisco. I really had nothing. So I had to be clever about where I was going. [I went in the direction of things that] seemed brutally capitalistic because I brutally needed to eat.

I guess I meant more as an ownership structure of the property. Why not set it up as a communal, collectivist environment? Rather than having everyone working individually in little squares with hard lines between them, why not have them work together on something?
I know what you mean. I think that’s just nature of the first property. When I started, I hit this conceptual barrier because there’s no way all of these ideas can exist on the same grid. Which is why I chose to only make this first property 10,000 inches large, so that it would end. There would be an end, and, by then, we would have a bit of an audience and we’d have people involved, and all of that. And then we can do part two.

A book on property law that had been owned by a woman named Susan Loveland, inspired the project’s name.

Are the Loveland buyers interacting with each other?
No, not at all. We haven’t provided any tools for that.

One of the things that’s so funny about this first property is we’re at the 10,000 square inch level, and we’ve sold 9,000 and that’s fine. The number of people I think we’re approaching is 550 right now, and that’s just a shitload of people. They’re very diverse. I’m not going to reach out to everybody. Start off with a Facebook group, and inch along.

There are many points of view of what this is, how people appreciate it. I get letters from people that had to move away from Detroit, or whose grandparents live there, or are sentimental. Or other people are amped to build stuff. I’m sure there’s some speculators in there. It’s crossed my mind we could throw a Facebook connect on that map or something, but it just blows my mind. Let’s think about it before we add social tools to that site. [But] there’s nothing stopping people, like you said. I think once this thing is on the ground, that’s when the chatter will break out. And it will be quite a thing to see, for sure.

Has anyone from Detroit’s city government contacted you?
I’ve not spoken with anybody directly. Detroit is an interesting town because it’s a very big city, but also a very small pond. You go around, you go to parties and hang out and you meet fairly quickly a lot of the big entrepreneurs and people in politics. So I don’t have a lot of great big name connections in the city, but I can say informally that I can go somewhere in the city and I’ll meet somebody that’s involved in, say, a real estate council in the city. Like, they have groups that are active in various zoning conversations and all of this kind of stuff. And the people I talk to are highly [informed]. They like it.

One of the things I like about Detroit is that sometimes people will look at something and say, ‘You can’t do this thing. It’s ridiculous. That’s illegal. Or you’re just making light of a situation in the city.’ But you talk to people in the city that have a hand in the allocation of land and they’ll like it because they see something in it and it could bring positive energy and use for land. In my experience, the closer you get to it, the more desirable it is.

What do Plymouth’s neighbors think?
I actually don’t know yet. I picked a spot that wouldn’t be in anyone’s face. There’s a house further down the street that I need to go and talk to the people. I haven’t done it yet, and it’s going to be great. I’m a little excited, but also a little nervous—just ‘cause. I’m taking very seriously this first meeting where this weirdo shows up at their doorstep.

The only neighbor that I know just the other day called me on the phone and he has a bunch of vacant lots and commercial buildings right in the area. And he volunteered space. He wants to work out an arrangement where he would get a little bit of the proceeds in exchange for having access to the facades of a few buildings or open land. He’s right there in the neighborhood. That was positive.

Where in Detroit do you live?
I live in Corktown. Are you familiar with the city?

I grew up there.
I live on Bagby and 6th Street, almost right across from the old Tiger Stadium, which was here until like four months ago. That was one of the first things I saw when I moved here, this ‘Oh, look, we’re knocking things down for _Transformers_’ or whoever paid a little bit of money for that. I’m right there. Tiger Stadium in its last days was filmed for a number of productions, but none of them were in fact the impetus for the demolition.]

I live in a house with four other people. Where I lived for the first six months I was here was the Russell Industrial Central. It’s an old Chrysler plant—I believe—and it’s right where I-75 and I-94 cross, and it’s this huge 2 million square foot factory that’s been turned into studio space. It’s one of these great things about Detroit that’s a little bit different. For 500 bucks a month I get my nice house with my friends. It’s the third closest house to downtown. I have this great big studio space that I share, and I have a property. That’s rad.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in New Jersey, and have lived around the country a fair bit. I’m one of these people that feels very at home in the U.S. So I grew up on the East Coast and I went to school in Houston, lived in Los Angeles, then Portland, then Brooklyn for a while, then San Francisco, and now here.

Why did you move to Detroit?
For opportunity. For a fascination with the city. I’d never really spent time here before. It just really appealed. All of my spider senses just tingled. I’m really not content to work in traditional centers. It was really exciting to work on a project so far from where this kind of stuff [usually] happens. I wish there were more software developers in Detroit.

It’ll happen eventually.

— INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL BYRNE