81. About Location Currency

About Location Currency
Bob Komives
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What must exist everywhere yet must be everywhere unique? —location.

Location is currency for all communities and governments that preside over geographic areas. Unique sets of privileges and obligations, costs and benefits go with residence in U.S. America, the State of Colorado, the City of Fort Collins. Every place has assets and liabilities given it by geology, geography, weather, history, and ecology. As a community invests and disinvests in the resources that are tied to location, that community's location currency rises and falls in value. Good schools and services tend to increase demand for local property. That demand raises property values and the tax base to pay for schools and services. Pollution and crime do the opposite.

This location-based currency system is inevitable but imperfect. Deeds (to a location) can be traded just as money and stock can. As with money, there are delays and leaks between the outflow of expense and the return of benefit. As with money much of the value reflected in the price of a transaction depends upon larger factors. The value of the deed to one site depends, for example, upon a larger locational currency that reflects value from community investment in facilities and services.

Communities often find themselves in competition with one another. One community promotes its own location currency. This may be good for larger society —driving the quality of local school systems upward to attract industry. It may be bad —driving the enforcement of health and safety regulations downward to attract industry. The wise larger community fosters positive competition and discourages the negative.

Despite its imperfections, location currency is inevitable, powerful, and inalienable. It is inalienable because it is something that no location-based community can give up. Thus, local economic development logically starts and ends with attention to the value people place on living, working, and visiting there —the value of the community's location currency.

:: Bob Komives, Fort Collins © 2006 :: Plum Local IV :: 81.  About Location Currency  ::
With attribution these words may be freely shared, but permission
is required if quoted in an item for sale or rent

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