Fractional ownership works for Banksy paintings—not cities

Micro-sovereignties should be collectively owned by residents. Not fractionally owned by investors.

This essay is my contribution to Post Nation, seven writers exploring a world after nation-states. Support the project by collecting the series as a digital or print pamphlet. 👇🏻

In 2025, I purchased 25 shares in a Banksy painting that the art investment platform Masterworks purchased for $8.7 million. Very few could afford the full sticker price, but by opening ownership of the painting to hundreds of investors rather than just one, Masterworks makes it accessible to everyone.

My shares cost just $500—others paid millions—but when the painting sells in 9 years, all of our investments stand to increase in value as the painting does. Even museums who can earn a stake from the paintings on their walls.

It’s not just luxury goods. WeFunder has made it similarly possible to invest in and fractionally own businesses. I contributed to Substack that way, investing $3,000 alongside investors who put in millions. The platform is also how I financed my next book—I raised more than $100,000 from some 200 people, rather than one large publishing house owning it all.

Platforms like these allow anyone to fractionally own assets that go up in value. Why shouldn’t cities be owned the same way? By the people and businesses who live and work there? That’s a hypothesis I initially pursued while writing Let Cities Build Utopia. But while fractional investment works great as an investment in assets or businesses, I don’t think it works great for cities for one reason: Fractional investment is uneven ownership. Those with more equity benefit more than those with less equity. Does that really make sense for a city where everyone lives together?

Should a city benefit those who own lots of land more than those who rent an apartment? Should it benefit someone who lived in the city for 50 years more than it benefits the person who just moved there? Should we onboard and offboard people who move around, with cities benefiting transient populations least of all? And are dividends the best way to reward residents of a neighborhood? Because if your neighborhood is rich, you get cash?

A much better option is for the city to be owned by a trust that is regulatorily enforced to act in the interest of all residents—as more than 500 Scottish communities currently do. Here all land and assets are held by a trust which earns leases from commercial and residential real estate and reinvests those earnings back into the city. Residents don’t earn dividends proportional to their stake. The benefit is the city: the affordable housing it provides, the well-funded schools it supports, the energy they can now afford, the low commercial rents that keep Main Street alive and full of small businesses and niche restaurants.

That Banksy painting I own, after all, will benefit those who invested millions much more than it will benefit me, who invested $500. And Substack will be more motivated to benefit the VCs who invested millions in its company than the writers who contributed a few thousand. Fractional ownership is interesting and good—it cuts more people in on the deal than just investors and aligns incentives within communities who put their heart and soul and yes, money, into supporting the things they are passionate about.

But cities shouldn’t work like that.

AcreTrader gives us a glimpse of how fractional ownership works for land. Instead of one farmer owning thousands of acres, AcreTrader allows hundreds of people to share ownership, including the farmer. When I spoke to Rob Moore, the company’s general manager, he told me previous generations only needed to farm 2,500 acres to make a living, today they need to farm 5,000. Farmers can’t afford that much land.

“If you need 5,000 acres and it costs $10,000 an acre, that’s $50 million,” Moore says. “Nobody has $50 million.”

There’s an old adage that farmers live poor and die rich—they have millions of dollars worth of land they can’t sell because they need to farm it to make a living. And farming hardly makes a living. To solve this, AcreTrader gathers a group of 100 to 150 investors to buy the land, with the farmer often participating as part-owner too. The farmer leases the land from the investors—often at a discount depending on their ownership share—and reaps sole benefit from his or her farming business. When AcreTrader sells the land again in 5-10 years, all owners stand to benefit from the sale, including the farmer.

This is an interesting model for farmland, especially as it solves one of the major problems facing agricultural businesses today: No one wants to live on the farm.

“Imagine you’re a farmer. You own 1,000 acres of the 5,000 you farm. Then you die, your inheritance goes to your four children. Odds are at least three of them, and probably four of them, don’t live in northwestern Iowa and don’t farm. Those four individuals just inherited $10 to $50 million worth of value—they’re not looking to hold onto and manage a farm that is 1,000 miles away from where they live. The vast majority of them end up selling the farmland. That is creating a lot more turnover within agricultural real estate, and ultimately becoming commoditized.”

In the future, farmland could become fully institutionalized or it could become fractionalized. Moore is after the latter effect. Legally, AcreTrader investments are still limited to accredited investors, but this is only the first step of widening access to land ownership. “We’re not fully democratizing access—that’s the goal, that’s the ideal, and it’s frustrating that we’re not there,” Moore says. “But let’s say [farmland ownership] was available to 1% of households before—now it’s available to 20%. We’re still one in five, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

Jubilee Homes works similarly, but with residential land. Here, a resident and Jubilee buy a house together—the resident buys the house and Jubilee buys the land.

The company uses the think tank AEI to determine the value of the home vs. the value of the land. “At the county level, the average land share percentage, according to this third party, is 65% in San Francisco,” Jubilee founder and CEO Brian Elbogen told me. “So if you want to buy in San Francisco County we will buy the land share of the entire property for 65% of the total property value.”

The individual takes out a loan to buy the house and pays monthly rent to Jubilee for the land. Both the house price (plus interest) and the land lease are structured into the same mortgage, with the land lease increasing by 3% annually. At any time, the homeowner can purchase the land from Jubilee, whether they are still living or the property or preparing to sell it on the market.

Jubilee, as an organization, gets institutional investment. A retirement pension fund or life insurance company that needs to be able to reliably pay out stockholders in the future can’t afford to invest their dollars in a risky place. Instead, they invest in something more stable: Land ownership, for instance.

“You can think of us, from a business model perspective, a lot like a mortgage company,” Elbogen tells me. “Rocket is a good example. What do they do? They originate mortgages with customers, then they sell those mortgages to investors, and they maintain the relationship with the customer. Here we are effectively originating a ground lease, selling that ground lease to these large institutional investors, and then we retain the relationship with the customer. We’re the property manager on behalf of the investor.”

Investors in Jubilee will eventually own the land beneath thousands of homes, and see revenue gains as it is sold and purchased on the market.

Fractional ownership is a band-aid

The utopian version of both models is that people don’t have to spend as much on land or a house. But the dystopian version is that now a bunch of investors own most of both assets.

We’ve already seen this play out with commercial real estate. For my grandparents’ generation, commercial real estate was cheap. It wasn’t uncommon for a car mechanic to own his own garage or a bodega owner to own her own shop. But as commercial real estate went up in value and those business owners sold their real estate and retired, commercial properties were bought up by investors who could earn returns developing and renting them out. By my parents’ generation, ordinary individuals couldn’t afford commercial real estate—they had to rent from the wealthy investors who did. And small businesses no longer benefit from an asset that will help them retire.

The same thing is now happening with residential real estate. If my grandparents were the last generation who could afford the buildings their businesses were based in, mine might be the last generation who can afford to own the houses we live in. My husband and I purchased our home for just $390,000 in 2017 with a 3.2% interest rate—it’s worth $670,000 now with a 6.3% interest rate. Assuming a $100,000 down payment, that’s the difference between a $1,254/month mortgage and a $3,528/month mortgage, or about $2,350 extra each month. The exact difference between my mortgage and my sister’s mortgage, who is 11 years younger.

Median household income hasn’t kept pace—growing by $22,360 from 2017 (when median household income was $61,372) to 2024 (when median household income was $83,730). That’s nearly $6,000 less younger generations get to keep every year than my generation was able to, because housing is so expensive. And with rents just as sky high, younger generations have a much harder time building up that down payment in the first place. At the age of 27, 40.5% of Baby Boomers owned their own house, while only 32.6% of Gen Zers do at the same age. The median age for a first-time home buyer in 1981 was just 29—as of 2025 it is 40.

It’s easy then, to see fractional ownership as a step in the wrong direction. Sure, I can’t afford the land I farm anymore, but I can afford 5% of it. Sure, I can’t afford the house I live in anymore, but I can afford 20% of it. Fractional ownership may be better than not owning anything at all, but it’s also cutting people in on a deal that could just be theirs.

“The vision that I have for this is a little bit more nuanced,” Jubilee’s Elbogen told me. “Today, the worldview of home ownership is either you own nothing or you own everything—rent or buy. I bought into a tenant in common in San Francisco because I couldn’t afford to buy a single-family house. I own 33% of an entire building, but it got me into home ownership. Like, was that bad because I only own 33% of something instead of 100%? Well, guess what? I own 33% of something instead of 100% of nothing.”

He’s right. Maybe fractional ownership doesn’t replace ownership. It replaces renting—the middle phase of a person’s life between when they own nothing and when they own something. And there’s something to be said for AcreTrader or Jubilee in that use case. But neither fundamentally solve the problem of why land and housing is so expensive to begin with. Because when the “market rate” is whatever people are willing to spend on something, and wealthy individuals can easily bid each other up in price, then real estate becomes out of reach for most people.

Cutting us in on a fraction of that deal becomes the best we can really hope for.

AcreTrader and Jubilee both give individuals access to an appreciating asset—and that’s good!—but both rely on market rate real estate which will benefit investors most of all.

Land that never skyrockets in the first place, is much better.

Community land trusts are a cure

I’ve written extensively about Community Land Trusts in Eigg, Stornoway, Bournville, and Letchworth. They are particularly common in England and Scotland where land is purchased and removed from the market, then owned by the trust in perpetuity.

Residents and businesses can purchase and own their houses and buildings, but they lease the land beneath it from the trust. Lease rates are set using an equation like: costs + small margin = lease rate. That’s the direct opposite of “whatever someone is willing to pay for it.” The same benefit applies to agricultural land where the rent is whatever the town decides, not whatever the market will pay.

As a result, real estate is never so high that it is not affordable by its farmers, homeowners, or businesses. And because land trusts are a protected category, all lease earnings must be reinvested for the benefit of residents.

That’s how the Island of South Uist paid for and now owns the largest community wind farm in Scotland. In 2006, the Scottish island and two others—Eriskay and parts of Benbecula—formed Sealladh na Beinne Mòire (SnBM for short), a community trust that purchased 92,000 acres, 850 crofts, and three quarries for £4.5 million.¹

At the time of the buyout, the islands were in disrepair. SnBM immediately raised commercial leases for the quarries, as well as fishing and shooting fees. They repaired the previous landlord’s hunting lodge so they could rent it out for sporting events, and resurrected a famed golf course, which hosts an annual open that brings dollars back to the local economy. In 2013, their financial stability allowed them to take out an £8.5 million loan and £2.5 million in capital grants to pay for the wind turbines,² which now provide energy and income for the islands.

The turbines brought in £1.2 million in 2015. That income, plus more grants from HIE (£5 million) as well as the Western Isles Council (£625k) funded a new marina in 2015, which supported the growth of leisure and industrial marine economies. The success of both projects led to further investments: A harbour expansion project, an investment in the local seaweed industry, and a tourism center and golf course. Each project funding the next.

The results are staggering.

Before the land was bought by the community, all lease revenue flowed to private landlords. Today, nearly 20 years after the community bought their land, the trust generates between £250k and £800k a year in rental profits and between £763k and £1.5 million in wind farm profits.³

Nearly all of those surpluses are reinvested in the community. The trust invests between £200k and £450k in new buildings, plants, or turbines each year, with another £650k to paying down their loan principal for the wind farm. As of 2023, it’s holding £3.5 million in cash, and as of 2024 it’s holding £4.8 million in wind farm loans. When the loans are paid off, that’s even more money for community reinvestment—on an island of only 3,200 people.

The result is a new economy on an island people were leaving. And an affordable life that allows them to stay.

AcreTrader’s farmers still won’t be able to afford farmland 10 years from now because it will continue to be bought and sold at market rate. That means farmers will always have to rent, or at best, fractionally own the land they till. But SnBM crofters will always be able to afford their land because it will never be sold.⁴

Jubilee has to sell land at market rate, which will continue to remain out of reach for residents. SnBM doesn’t, because the commercial revenue it generates from its wind, marina, harbour, and seaweed economies funds residential affordability in perpetuity. Jubilee’s land returns flow upward to pension funds and insurers. SnBMs land returns flow sideways, into the next turbine, the next harbour, the next generation of residents.

On the islands, outside investors don’t own the land, a corporation doesn’t own the commercial district, and nothing is being bought and sold at ever-increasing market rates that, in the US and around the world, force local populations out and investors in. Instead, farmers stay on their land forever. Children don’t have to move to the mainland to find work. Residents can afford their homes, their farmland, and their businesses, permanently. The trust constantly earns money and recycles it back into resident needs.

We don’t need to be cut into an increasingly expensive real estate game. We need to avoid it getting expensive altogether. With community land trusts, the fundamental equation is seismically altered.

There’s a lot to love about fractional ownership of paintings, books, businesses—even farmland and housing—but collective ownership is better.

At least when it comes to the cities and towns we all live in together.

1. Residents of the islands put in £400k themselves, took out a bank loan for £400k, and raised the rest in grants— £2.25 million from the National Lottery Fund and an estimated £1.75 million from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise.

2. According to Renewable Energies 2013 accounts.

3. Comparing 2023 and 2022 balance sheets from the three organizations within SnBMs portfolio: South Uist Estates which holds the land and earns rents. South Uist Renewable Energies which owns and runs the wind farm. Storas Uibhist which owns and manages the Grogarry Lodge, as well as hunting and fishing on the island.

4. “Crofting,” in fact, is a nationally protected category. Scottish farmers living on 2-20 acres own their buildings, rent land from a landlord, and are ensured low rents and freedom from eviction. Within SnBM, the landlord is replaced by the community trust. The crofter is no longer an inconvenience to a landlord who might wish to use their land otherwise, but an asset to a community that holds the land in common.