Look what happened during the development of the eco-village Boekel. At first there was an enthusiastic group of people who wanted to live and work in their own way. Maybe it was originally a TT group. They occupy a 11 acres plot of land and install mobile homes where gradually more and more families are staying, temporarily and permanently. Protests are coming from the neighbouring residential area. Indignation about children playing in the mud there. Then the town deprives them of 8.5 acres on which nothing has yet been built. They're told to leave. Then a dialogue is established and they must promise to build houses according to national housing standards. Eventually they make a building plan with about 30 climate-positive houses and a lot of attention for materials (no cement) and energy consumption. Then you see how this project is going to be wrapped up in debt. The municipality sells them the land (2.5 acres) for more than 1 million euros. They collect this money by crowdfunding plus the sale of certificates (with 2% interest). On top of that, a German cooperative bank lends them 4,5 million with 2.2% interest and the province also borrows 1 million. The construction has just begun. Everything is done by construction companies. See this link. So in the end you see that their initial longing to decouple from the current economy only ends up with the fact that they will be able to live emission-free in terms of housing. But they must all continue to work in that current economy to be able to pay and repay the burdens. They do have plans to do something about food, but (a) they already have too little territory for that, and (b) how much time are they able to spend on it, all the more because their collective organization needs a lot of regulating (think of coordinating care for maintenance and mutual relationships, handling procedures regarding departures and new entrants, managing financial input and output).

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