CORPS OF THE UNITED STATES · BUILDING · DOSSIER 01PROPOSED · PENDING RATIFICATION

Building Corps.

The shelter of the people: the homes in which Americans live, the streets that connect them, and the schools, clinics, and libraries that hold a community together.

By §3, the Corps holds the country's physical plant — the homes Americans live in, the schools their children walk to, the clinics their families use, the labs where the next medicine is developed, the stations the commuters ride. The corps is staffed at proper craft ratios — master, journeyperson, apprentice — and holds every asset it builds for a hundred years. The spec writer and the bill payer are the same entity. The workforce that builds the building is the workforce that lives in it; every move that costs more up front and pays itself back over the building's life accrues to the same balance sheet, so the move gets made. Developer housing — built by a party that does not pay the heating bill, does not live in the room, does not own the building in year thirty — is unwound; the deskilling pressure of profit-motivated ownership is removed; apprenticeship returns as the structural baseline of the workforce, not a vocational track for the kids who didn't get into college.