Questions, and the person
First the objections, straight. Then why Salem, and who's behind this.
Preemptive answers
Fair objections deserve straight answers — tap any that's on your mind.
If by socialism you mean state or collective ownership of the housing — no. Tenants aren't collective owners, the state doesn't operate the properties, and the model doesn't abolish rent, contracts, property ownership, or cash flow.
If by socialism you mean any system where value benefits ordinary people instead of flowing upward to private owners — then the word is being stretched too broad to be useful.
Liberty Bee operates inside a market economy. The difference is simply that surplus stays inside the housing system instead of being extracted upward.
It operates inside capitalism, yes — that's the point. We're not pretending market constraints disappear. It uses ownership, rent, contracts, pricing, reserves, and cash flow. The difference is that surplus is retained inside the housing system instead of taken as private gain.
A free market doesn't require every participant to use the same model or profit strategy. Liberty Bee is just a different operating model within a proven market — and the market can judge whether it works.
Operationally, sure. The difference is governance and use of surplus. A conventional landlord extracts surplus for owner return. Liberty Bee retains it — for reserves, maintenance, affordability, tenant stability, and disciplined growth.
Because it's a testable alternative sitting between conventional rental extraction and subsidy-dependent affordable housing. We're not asking funders to fund a vibe — they'd be funding a model with explicit assumptions, defined failure conditions, and reproducible simulations.
Because rent has to cover real costs. Set it below operating reality and the model collapses — that's exactly what the survival curve on the story page is showing you. Liberty Bee starts below market, then deepens affordability through tenure-based reductions and retained surplus only when the system can carry it.
The model can't fix that — the rules and the people have to. A humane system is not a naive one. Liberty Bee needs clear screening, lease enforcement, a hardship policy, reserve rules, and honest failure conditions.
No. Charity is episodic relief. Liberty Bee is institutional design — it uses housing cash flow to create durable affordability, without requiring every operating dollar to come from donations.
First — we'd have to have grants. This version of the model doesn't include grant funding at all; it's on the roadmap for whoever continues the model. And even then, grants would be acquisition accelerators, not operating life support. If operations need grants to survive, the model is broken — which is exactly why we didn't build them in.
Ownership isn't automatically stability or benefit. It adds responsibility, risk, maintenance, taxes, insurance, financing, and legal complexity. Some tenants want ownership — it's part of the modern American Dream. Some have no desire to own. Some just need stable rental housing.
Liberty Bee can support pathways to ownership without pretending ownership is the only valid form of housing security.
Why Salem?
One — because a made-up town proves nothing.
Every number in the story’s problem section comes from one real place. We didn't pick an easy market to look good — Salem is hard: tight, expensive, fast-gentrifying, homes pricey enough that buying them outright takes real capital. If a non-extractive operator can make it here, that means something. If it can't — far better to learn that in a simulation than with people's homes. And every one of those numbers is a knob, not a law: point the model at your city and run it.
Two — because I want to live there.
Let me switch from Liberty Bee to myself for a moment.
Back in 2024 we — my wife and I — decided that once our kid goes off to college, we're moving to Salem. I love the city. The community, the culture, the diversity, the history, the architecture. Walking through the empty streets at night and standing barefoot in winter-cold water before the sun rises. I've never felt more at home.
So we started talking about how we could make money. In a tourist town, when you have a little capital you could leverage, an obvious answer is Airbnb. Which was… fine… for a bit. But the more I thought it over, the more uncomfortable I got.
Eventually I realized why. If I truly loved Salem for all the reasons I claimed to, why would I actively pursue the one thing that's anathema to the greatest part of what I loved — the people?
So I started thinking of ways I could be a positive part of the community instead. This idea rose from that. That's why Salem.
Why you should trust me
You shouldn't.
I'm a baby born in a bus — because that's our home. I'm a kid watching his mom work like hell to give her children a better life. I'm a young adult with shady side-hustles just to make rent. I'm a guy begging for jobs and opportunities to learn. I'm a husband and a father and have far too many little furry animals in my house. I'm working long hours to make ends meet and keep the wolves away. I'm a man with a crazy idea about housing that won't leave his head... so I built it. Tested it. More than two years since I started my first attempt at expressing it... over a year and a half just on this version... But I built it. And laid it out here for you to see.
I'm just a guy.
But maybe I'm like you.
Where I don't have cash, I've got brains, sleepless nights, and data.
That doesn't mean you should trust me. And I'm not asking you to.
Trust the data.
The chance of anyone handing me millions of dollars and telling me to put this into action is… non-zero. So the next best thing is for me to take my idea and put it out there publicly.
Take the data. Take the code. Run it yourself. Tweak it. Change it. Poke holes in it.
Maybe some altruistic billionaire will take it and run with it. Probably a non-zero chance of that as well.
What do I get out of this?
A couple of people have asked me this now, so I figured I'd address it here.
What do I get out of this?
Short answer: Nothing material. Nothing is for sale. The code and data are free and licensed to stay that way. If anything, I operate at a financial loss every single month that I work on this.
Long answer…
Let me start by quoting Alan Watts…
"…the idea that all existence is relative, that all existence is transactional. The transaction being typically exemplified by, say, the operation of buying and selling, in which there can be no buying without somebody selling, and there can be no selling without somebody else buying."
There's an idea of material transaction that pervades our society. If something is not a job then it's either a side hustle or a hobby.
And that's very often true. Because we're all struggling. So things are most often a way to struggle less, or to take our minds off the struggle.
Watts followed up with this, though: "That kind of interdependence of the inside going together with the outside, what is in you going together with what is outside you, is absolutely fundamental to existence. It is existence. Existence is relativity."
And that's where I land. As a person working with databases, "transactions" are my bread and butter. They're literally called "transactional databases". This for that. That for this. I understand why people think this is the only way. But Watts spoke of a different transaction. A spiritual and philosophical transaction. I exist in relation to everyone else. What I am "selling" is an idea. A philosophy. What you are "buying" is, hopefully, recognition. That this is an idea deserving of existence. The cost of my selling is my time… and, honestly, a bit of sanity. The price of you buying is an open mind.
There was an idea, once, called Noblesse Oblige, meaning "Nobility Obliges". It was an idea that people with wealth, power, or status had a duty to provide for those… lower… than themselves. It's why we have all of these old parks and libraries and museums that were funded by industrialists and robber barons. Things useful and helpful to the common person provided by arguably terrible people.
I don't have wealth, power, or status, but I believe in a similar, more reachable idea: Praesentia Obligat — "Presence Obliges". Because I am here, because I can see the need, and because I have capacity to contribute, my presence creates an obligation. I can't give you a library, but I can give you an idea.
When I first started work on this idea, I told a handful of people, "Hey, we could help people and make a living still," but, at this point, the plan is to just fire this off into the void and hope it touches someone.
Liberty Bee operates through moral reciprocity. You should, if you can, contribute to the world that sustains you — without requiring the benefit to return to you personally or directly.
That's what I get out of this.
The Watts passages are from the Out of Your Mind lecture series (part 4) — cited because checkability is the house style, even for philosophy.
One last disclosure
Here's the honest story of how this exists.
I built the first version from scratch, by myself, in T-SQL. Those of you who know are probably thinking to yourselves, "gross" — and I agree. It was rough. And deeply, deeply flawed. But I'm a SQL Server DBA turned Data Architect. I've developed as needed throughout my career, but the gaps in my knowledge would never have allowed me to build this in any reasonable time. As of this moment, it's been over a year and a half of development. So don't come at me saying, "well, you could've just learned Python." Yeah, I could have. I could have learned Python and data science. And instead of reading this page now, you'd be reading it four or five years into the future.
What carried it here is that I took what I've learned from watching brilliant project managers and developers work at other companies. Through fits and starts, I learned to run AI the way a project manager runs a team of developers: I set the direction, made every ruling, argued the philosophy, hunted down the overclaims, did the UAT, performed code review where I could, and held the line on honesty — and the AI did the heavy lifting of code, analysis, and grind. The idea, the mission, and the call on every honest-versus-flattering tradeoff are mine. The execution was a partnership.
AI is very divisive right now. I could just as easily have said, "yeah, look what I did." But that runs counter to everything I've been trying to do. Honesty without flattery is the whole point. I can't tell you how many nights we fixed a problem and that fix caused massive shifts in the simulation's outcomes that left me feeling thoroughly defeated. Hell, the first part of this year (2026) was almost no active development. Just me, in my feelings. The only reason I picked this back up the last time was that I finally decided it was worth just getting to a completed state and putting it out in public — maybe the failed idea would still benefit someone. And then I'd never think about this stupid thing again.
And that's the point. It's more important to be honest and real than to just sell a perfect picture. So, yes — AI was instrumental in making this happen. This project is what one determined person with a clear idea and the right tools can build now (also, I learned what an em-dash and an en-dash were — and maybe AI teaching us how to actually use our language isn't so bad… now if I could just master the semicolon). You don't have to take my word that any of it holds up. The rules are written down, the code and data are downloadable, and every number re-runs from a seed. Check it yourself. That was always the deal.
Get in touch
Liberty Bee was built in the open, and it stays in the open. Found a flaw, want to point the model at your own city, or want to talk about funding a real one? Reach out.