CIP-10: Income generating property

Proposals (CIPs)
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First, note that there may be limitations on if we can acquire income generating properties and how that revenue is used. For example, it likely cannot be distributed to citizens. It may likely be used to fund the DAO treasury. Stay tuned for updates from legal.

That said, I propose two different ideas for our second property.

Option A: Paid parking lot

Option B: Rental Property

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Option A is a conflict of interest if AirGarage is being used as Scott is the co-founder and CTO of the company. Knowing if profits can be distributed to citizens is a must before adopting a measure like this.

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Thank Scott for your work on this, but I agree with @garbageboy that COI is an issue here and we should have a Constitution that is requiring full disclosure of conflict of interest in cases like that.

Before voting it would be nice to have business plans or similar calculations, is the CIP-10 just to guide the direction or is the next step already the acquisition of land? Whats with taxes?

I also agree that it would be beneficial to know if profits can be distributed or not.

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I think the concern that Option A is a COI is skepticism for the sake of skepticism. As an alternative perspective, it’s also an opportunity for a mutually beneficial partnership. Bpetes of the core team is heavily involved with Bankless, and as a result, CityDAO and Bankless have closely supported each other. While Scott’s ties to AirGarage should certainly be disclosed, we should keep in mind that this can be used to our advantage.

That being said I do think we should determine the full legal possibilities before voting. I don’t think the full business plan needs to be worked out, as a lot of that arises from a discussion about the proposal, but knowing our limitations from a legal perspective would completely change our options.

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We should purchase properties or investments that align with our values, constitution and our future roadmap.

I think at some point we should spend some time talking about CityDAO’s constitution and values.

Some other things to think about, physical cities (Layer 0 cities?) have a large number of issues, ex. homelessness, lack of equal opportunity, being carbon neutral, funding. Are we going to try to solve some of these problems on CityDAO (Layer 1 city?)?

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I’m wondering if we might have multiple categories of revenue generating strategies:

  1. Traditional - earn revenue by renting land to a service that generates revenue.

…but also

  1. Novelty - position CityDAO land as something special specifically because its owned by a DAO, and drive revenue from ecosystem giants that gain value from novelty and awareness.

Some examples:

  • Plant trees on super cheap land in the formation of brand logos that can be seen by satellite images
  • Co-working/office space primarily offered to web3 companies, sponsored by brands
  • Burning-man type land, rented out to a web3 event coordination effort like raave (@ssp was talking about an NFT conference at one point, maybe he can weigh in on ideas here)
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I like this motivation. Innovation must be our priority. money comes later.

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I upvote this comment. I think it’s important to establish core values that can be enforced in every aspect of the development of this project.

People are sick of the current societal structure (at least in the US) where income is drastically unevenly distributed, there’re huge problems with waste, pollution, drugs, homelessness, underpaid salary workers, overpriced city condos.

And if we have a chance to build something new we really should focus on what our values are, and how can we not fall back into the same feudalistic mentality.

In terms of Income generating I want to propose the ‘Conscious capitalism’ model where businesses still fit into the capitalist structure but do it with awareness and fairness before profit. This documentary Real Value displays this concept really well with businesses precedents. (trailer here)

An idea that fits into this concept is: improving land soil health and eco diversity to raise the land value.

This farm is a great example, it transferred a dead piece of desert land in LA into a beautiful eco forest farm.

If potentially there’s an ICO to improve the land value and eco-diversity, the token value would indefinitely raise once the effects and benefits of soil and biodiversity surface up.

Within a beautiful natural environment, a lot more projects can be made, things like crypto smart cities, eco resorts, growing of rare supplements (all the lion’s mane, ashwagandha, algea farm), it can even be an incubator for nextgen businesses on sustainability and decentralized tech.

Property can be traded, rented to generate consistent income. It can be a one-of-a-kind tourist attraction based on its beautiful environment and decentralized nature, and much more to come.

But going back to what @Jack was saying, I think it’s important to clarify the core values with the community and organizations. There are a million ways to generate income from properties, which ones should we choose?

I’d love to hear the CityDAO team @greg talk about the core values more in the weekly stream or on the website, and engage more with the community on it. I think it’d give a more clear direction to the communities and developers, things like: What do we want to build? What to avoid? Aspects of the future you care about the most? How does everyone measure the quality of life? etc…

Maybe citizens/communities can vote on issues they care about the most, and keep being part of the conversation as we move forward ^^

1 Like
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I think there are huge benefits to focusing initially on preserving open space for the benefit of human and natural communities.

  • It minimizes the amount of development needed to properties
  • It can be done on relatively cheap land
  • Helps mitigate many of the ecological arguments against web3
  • It would hopefully be a goal that would be well accepted by local residents and governments near new CityDAO acquisitions preventing us from running into blockers we won’ t have resources or experience dealing with at first

WIth a mission like this we could possibly be partially funded by web3 projects that don’t have a carbon capture or ecological preservation component.

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I think we can gradually build a Disney land of cryptocurrency there and make it the very first place to visit for a cryptocurrency fanatic.

Maybe we can get started from building some statues there:

  • We may @ Elon Musk on twitter to ask him to denote a statue of Dogecoin. After the statue finished, Elon may drive his Tesla to the place and pay for the parking fee.

  • Also ask Coinbase, Binance and etc to build their statues there.

After that, we can start to gamify the construction of the city. A construction token may be minted to Citizens every week, the amount of token minted should be proportional to the City income. A cicitzen can burn the construction token to construct the city:

  • burn a construction token to Add a brick some where.
  • burn a construction token to color a surface of a wall.
  • etc.

And all the changes the citizens applied can be immediately previewed in a mirrored 3D model of the City, and may be quarterly, these changes will be applied to the real land.

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Agreed with @eth . @scottfits 's two ideas are ok as rough strokes but I think in order to discuss meaningfully we need -

A) A business case for each. If it can’t talk about ROI for the individual then it needs to make sense as ROI for the DAO. Buying either property to generate rent income means it will take [x] years to get the money back. We need to know what the [x] is.

B) How does each align with our values & mission? Buying & running a parking lot is cool but how exactly does this move us forward towards our goal? The financial returns can’t be the only answer because, by buying anything, we are tying up capital that could be deployed elsewhere for several years, before the rent income pays off the acquisition.

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I’d like to propose that we use Doorvest to acquire a rental property. Doorvest will manage all the logistics of owning the property

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Here’s an updated link to the Option B doc in notion as the previous one no longer works: Option B: Rental Property