So okay, back to square one. Quit the whining.
An investment is like buying a future. Not an option to buy, but a real future bought in advance of the event.
So what’s the future that the so-called real economy is offering here? What is this harbor, the great bay of New York, offering for investment?
An option on housing, let’s say. Decent housing in the submarine zone, in the intertidal.
Why is Joanna Bernal losing some liquidity there? It’s like she’s buying put options, making a bet that decent housing in the intertidal will be worth more later than now. Seems like a good bet.
What does Charlotte Armstrong want to avoid selling a call option on? She doesn’t want there to be an opportunity to buy the Met Life building. She didn’t offer that option and doesn’t like it that people are acting like she has.
What happens if there’s lots of decent housing in the intertidal? It increases a supply, which then decreases the demand on Charlotte’s place. Our place, if you want to put it that way. If I were to buy into the co-op that owns the place.
Okay.
So I went back up to the Cloister cluster to talk with Hector Ramirez again.
The trip up the Hudson was fun as always. Although the East River had refrozen and was now locked solid, the Hudson ice had broken up the week before, forming a giant ice jam at the Narrows that would slosh in and out on the tides until it either poured out to sea or melted. A fabulous slushy grumble from down there was sometimes audible all the way through lower Manhattan. The entire length of the Hudson had refrozen twice in the last week, then broken again on the tides. All that ice mostly had flowed south to join the jam, but upriver the breakup was still cracking off big chunks and floating them downstream. It was a time of year when it was obvious why it was called the mighty Hudson. The big ice plates floated around messing up traffic, shipping channels clogged with them, and all the barges and containerclippers had to dodge them like flocking birds, using the same algorithm and employing a lot of the cursing you hear among New Yorkers when they are cooperating with each other. Flocking birds curse each other in the same way, especially geese. Honk honk honk get outta my way what the fuck!
Coming in to the Cloister dock, I had to clunk my way through slush caught against the ice boom they had strung in a big circle around the dock, wincing at each hit to my unhappy hulls. Then through the downstream entry gate in the ice boom, taking my turn. While I was waiting, I looked over at the dirty snow covering the salt marsh where I had had my great epiphany. As I watched, a family of beavers came swimming right up to the ragged shore, big noses and heads on the parents, little ones on a line of four babies. They ducked into a beaver mound made of stacked branches and two-by-fours, just offshore from the bank. A low round house, not exactly neat, yet almost so. Constructed, for sure. Strong enough to handle the occasional bash from a passing ice floe. The beaver family disappeared inside, and I recalled from the museum displays that their doorway would be a tunnel underwater, leading up to an above-water level.
Housing in the intertidal.
Spring was springing.
I had scored a half hour with Hector, and once up on his flight deck I didn’t marvel at the view, awesome though it was; I didn’t want to waste time.
I tucked my pad into his tabletop and ran the prospectus for him. Vlade had put me in touch with his old city teammates’ diving co-op, the Bottom Feeders; they were good to go as divers. Vlade’s friend Idelba would serve as dredging subcontractor to them when needed, which, as Hector quickly pointed out, was likely to be often. An underwater drilling firm called Marine Moholes was willing to give us a few days when the bedrock was cleared of its overburden. It was an interesting question as to how many bollards would have to be placed to anchor a floating neighborhood, and how deep in the bedrock they would have to go, and I had gotten an engineering firm to give a preliminary answer: big anchors at the four corners, smaller ones between them: it came to about a dozen per block. How deep would a solid anchor have to go in the island’s schist and gneiss? Depended on how much pull on them there was going to be, also how many bollards you had. The engineers had weighed in, and now Hector and I dickered over that rather daunting depth for a while as if we were engineers. As often happened, I was surprised at how much he knew about the city. I had had to research all this, and here he was quoting depths of true bedrock off the top of his head, block by block.
The attachment cables were easier, as there were now any number of braids and bands made of new materials that were both stretchy and strong. I waxed eloquent on that front. “Hell you could hold the whole island in place with the latest fauxfascia. Its tensile strength was made for space elevators. You could tie the Earth to the moon with it.”
He just laughed. “Tides here max at about fifteen feet between low and high,” he said. “Usually more like ten. That’s what matters.” But that was well within the parameters of the cords I had researched, and he nodded as I pointed that out, and moved on to the platform rafts themselves.
Here again the basic templates were easy. Townships all over the world were floating around using the same tech already. Air pockets, basically; lots of them. Composite rafts, in which the plastics were as strong as steel, the glassy metals utterly saltproof, the diamond sheeting both waterproof and a little flexible. No problem to make a modular neighborhood, each unit the size of one New York city block, thus sticking to the notorious grid pattern already in place. Some of each raft would lie below water, but they were very buoyant, and the buildings on them could stack three or four stories tall before their weight got to be too much. Basements down in the rafts.
All the blocks would then float up and down on the tides and currents together. Underwater framing to keep the canals between them open and navigable, bumpers to keep the outer ones from bumping too hard into stationary neighbors in a storm. Saltproof and rustproof. Photovoltaic paint, farms on the roofs, water capture systems, water tanks on the roofs in the traditional NYC style, lifestraw purification filters, all standard operating procedure everywhere in lower Manhattan. Both water and power would be semiautonomous, maybe even autonomous.
It looked good.
Hector Ramirez thought so too. “You’ll need the city to approve the redevelopment, and reconfirm the old zoning, and maybe get some funding relief. The congressperson for that neighborhood should be on board too. Election this fall, right?”
“I guess so.”
He snorted at my cluelessness. “Talk to all the candidates, or at least the top dozen. It still matters.”
“Even in the wet zone?”
“Sure. It’s a federal issue, the intertidal. You’ll need the Army Corps of Engineers to weigh in. They like to make rulings, play with their toys.”
I suppressed a sigh but he heard it anyway.
“Fucking shut up and deal!” he said. “You get out of trading, you move into the real world, it’s a mess. It doesn’t get easier than trading, it gets harder! Finance is simple in comparison.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. But you’ll learn. Meanwhile, this is good. It’s so good you’ll take a huge amount of shit for it, and probably someone will steal it from you, do it first and take credit for it. So you’ll have to move fast.”
“I will. And you’ll go in on it?”
“Shit yes. We need this stuff, I know that. Go have some fun with it.”