Submission · October 2026
I request that this submission be published in full and attributed to me. Please quote it only with attribution to Michael van Diermen, chooseneighbors.com. I do not want it anonymised or de-identified. It is also published at chooseneighbors.com/dhs-community-connections-submission-2026.html
This submission and the material it references are provided under the Choose Neighbors Material License (chooseneighbors.com/license). No other licence is granted.
For almost all of human history, people lived in small groups of people they knew. A history documentary I keep coming back to puts it at 97% of our time on earth: strongly egalitarian groups that helped each other and resisted anyone who tried to rule or hoard. The sanction was simple: the group could leave, and the one who was greedy or coercive ended up alone. Nobody else was isolated, because nobody lived or worked among strangers. On this land, Aboriginal people lived that way for tens of thousands of years, and I write this with respect for that. It is also what my own ancestors' culture was, before it turned into the one I live in.
What changed is recent. In the last 3% of human existence we made permanent settlements where people owned land, and a person found something to do inside it, or belonged to a group that did. In the last 200 years, industry and the nation took over from the village: people stopped doing things locally, and kings and landowners put them to work for rations or a wage. Governments took over from the kings wanting people to work, rather than asking how people could work, and be part of a community, where they live. Space went from communal, to locally owned, to a vast area where nobody knows each other. Today a home is bought and sold to whoever can pay, so the people next to you are strangers chosen by price, and leaving costs more than most of us will ever have. That, to me, is one of the main causes of isolation: how homes are bought and sold.
None of this means getting rid of homes, home ownership or work. It means putting back the one thing that was lost: being able to live and work among people you chose, and to leave when it is wrong, without losing your home or your income. People once built their homes where they wanted, next to their friends, and did work that was useful to the group they cared about. The plan below is that, inside today's system of ownership and work.
What is bought. Cheap existing property, so the money goes into homes rather than margins: a hostel, hotel or monastery that converts to owned rooms; a street of cheap houses bought as they come up; a half-empty town; or land with common mains where owners finish their own homes. Rough entry costs from my plan: a hostel or hotel $300,000–2 million; rural or town-edge houses $50,000–150,000 each.
What residents pay. A room or an apartment is sold at what it cost (with a modest margin where there is a purchase, about 20%), or paid off over time at original value plus inflation. Payments are about 30% of income. Swapping homes costs only the difference in value. People on low incomes own a room and pay it off instead of renting forever.
Where the money goes. Repayments go back into buying or building the next homes, so the fund perpetuates itself. Unpaid homes are resold. Growth pauses by itself when no newcomers arrive. A share of homes is held free as a float; this is what makes every move possible, and it is the feature no other housing model has.
The failure clause, up front. If the community side stalls, what is left is ordinary property in an affordable area: it is sold and the money returned, or the funder keeps the homes. The downside is real estate; the upside is a model that repeats.
What I bring. $50,000 and more of my own savings and part of my future income; my labour, building on commission and organising for free; the working matching app at chooseneighbors.com; and thirty years of design, all published. I am looking for a loan or funding for the rest, and how much I can borrow is still to be worked out.
Where most of us live, everything around us is done by strangers from outside the area, who go home afterwards: the bins, the repairs, the shops, the council. There is nothing to do locally with the people you know, and no reason to step outside. The work app changes that.
It is cheap because the matching app already exists; this is a feature on it, not a new system. I will build it myself. It can run in a pilot of twenty homes, and it can run in an existing social-housing street tomorrow.
Every piece of this already exists somewhere: land trusts, cohousing, cost-rent co-ops, matching software (chooseneighbors.com/the-fragments.html). The assembly is the new part, and the matching that used to make it impractical is now something software and AI can run.
Isolation. Your own page says it: half of Australians are lonely, isolated, or both, and the harm is on a par with smoking. A program that lifts people towards groups and services they travel to on a schedule helps, but it does not change what is around a person every day. The default life most people are left with is being alone, without community where they live. Homes near chosen people, and work because those people are around, change the default.
Housing as a commodity. Land and homes in Australia are treated as an asset that must never go down. I saved for years while the cheapest homes rose around 20% a year and my term deposit paid 5%. Property prices are left out of the inflation figures because a home is counted as an investment, not a cost of living. Henry George wrote in 1879 that speculation in land "prevents labour from employing itself", and it still describes what I see. The connection to loneliness is direct: when a home is an investment, nobody on an ordinary income can move to be near their people, every move is taxed, and social housing allocates by wait list and scatters people among strangers for life. A loneliness program working inside a housing system built to inflate will keep refilling the same pool of lonely people. This plan takes land and homes out of that system: owned at cost, resold at cost plus inflation, moved by name change.
Representation at a human scale. In my district there is one elected representative for about 60,000 people; below that there is no one whose job it is to know a few hundred people and act on what they say. People stop raising problems, because there is nowhere for them to go. One organiser for every 150 people at most, chosen by the residents and part of the place, is the answer in this plan, and it is the role your model already wants to "activate". It is also why it matters that you asked: this consultation is the first time anyone in government has asked me. Build the asking into the program, through the organiser, so it does not end with this survey.
I have designed this for about twenty-seven years, and worked on it seriously for the last eight or nine. All of it is published free at chooseneighbors.com: the design, a business plan, a working matching app, a directory of existing communities, and a public journal kept for seven years. I know the isolation this program is about from the inside. In September I put the housing side of this to the Senate inquiry into social housing; this submission is the funding plan.
Everything on chooseneighbors.com is published under the Choose Neighbors Material License (chooseneighbors.com/license). Anyone, including DHS, councils and funded partners, may use, adapt and build with the writing, designs and code, free, with credit. The one condition beyond credit: a product or project built from it that passes US$1,000,000 in lifetime revenue pays a 5% royalty above that line. The ideas themselves are free to everyone.
I also offer my services (chooseneighbors.com/design-services): designing the pilot with a funded partner, council or housing provider; building the work app and the matching system; and the organiser approach for individual support. I am one person with long experience of this one subject, not an agency. If it genuinely builds community for isolated people, I am flexible to the point of free.
You asked what should be retained, changed or added. Keep the choice and self-determination. Add homes people pay off, near the people they choose, with work because those people are around. That is what I know, and I am ready to build it.
Michael van Diermen South Australia
Sent to the Community Connections team, Department of Human Services, South Australia, in response to the YourSAy consultation on the Community Connections Program model (closing 6 November 2026). © 2026 Michael van Diermen · License & copyright · Pitch note 2026 · The business plan