The Clothier, and What You Own

Most of what a household buys and stores elsewhere comes in NewVistas as a service. The community holds title to goods from the warehouse to the moment they are used; Business Enterprises hold them in custody and serve them by fee or subscription. A person owns very little — and is never short of what the plan provides.

Clothing as a service

Clothing is served by clothier, tailoring, laundering, repair, shoe, jewelry, and ceremonial-presentation Business Enterprises from a community-titled wardrobe inventory governed by Bureau 1. It aims to be neat, dignified, clean, fitted, durable, repairable, and beautiful through workmanship, with individuality kept through fit, style, craft, color, and culture rather than status. Children from four to eighteen wear high-quality, individually fitted student uniforms that mark them as students throughout the community, which is their campus; adults wear no uniform.

Each village has its own clothier — ninety-six in a full community — the craftsman of fit, style, and alteration, while one district supplier per district holds the community-wide depth of a category and runs cleaning, refurbishment, and production out of sight. Because clothiers draw from suppliers and lend among one another by tracked transfer, every clothier reaches one virtual inventory the size of the whole community — which cuts the per-person stock of occasional items such as ski kit, formalwear, and costume about fivefold. Shared outer items are sanitized to clean-new between wearers; what touches the body — liners, base layers, socks, religious and medical garments — is personal to one wearer. Garments are collected from each suite’s closet hatch by corridor robot, with no street vehicles. Worn stock runs through reuse, repair, and recycling before any new material is bought.

What stays with the person

• Memorabilia — photographs, family treasures, awards, the long-kept and seldom-used — kept in the suite’s ceiling storage, limited to what it holds. It moves with its owner and is the one category that passes at death.
• A large or specialized item a person brings, such as a classic car, is conveyed into community title and placed with a Business Enterprise that specializes in it; its former owner rents it as others may.
• Personal aids — a fitted wheelchair, hearing aid, or prosthesis — are community-titled and rented exclusively to the person where the Life Plan requires.
• Firearms are never kept by an individual or in a suite; they are held by specialist Business Enterprises at the rifle and gun centre. An old family firearm may be designated memorabilia and kept in professional custody, earning its owner a stated share of any rental revenue.

Animals

Every animal is titled to the community, and custody carries the responsibility. A small animal — twenty-five pounds or less at maturity — may be leased into a participant’s care in a suite of an animal-friendly village, and at lease end is passed on with its passport, never abandoned or sold. Larger animals — horses, goats, sheep, large dogs — always live with a professional Business Enterprise that feeds, houses, trains, and doctors them, and a participant has their use by subscription, the same animal to the same person where possible. Both fees are footprint fees, adjusted to actual cost.

Phased in, and disclosed

Owning nothing but memorabilia is disclosed to everyone who asks to join. In the rent-only years a participant owns what anyone outside owns — furniture, a car, a pet — and the change comes only at full entry, agreed with the Life Plan and Business Enterprise Plan. Entered and not-yet-entered neighbors live side by side until the community is large enough for most to be fully in.

Constitution, §4.28 and §4.30. Governed by Bureau 1, with Bureau 3 for firearms.