Read this first
After 2+ years, I’ve decided to wrap development on the Liberty Bee project. I still think it’s a good idea, but I’ve poured a lot of energy into this and, honestly, I need a break. So, for now, the project is mothballed with its record complete. Every number on these pages is final, every run reproduces from a seed, and the full stack — engine, data, tools — is published for whoever picks it up next. Maybe that’s me, someday. Or maybe it’s you. What was planned next lives on the method page. What follows is the complete answer to the question we set out to test.
— Gray
09/22/2026 (minor update to answer some questions 10/3/2026)
Short answer: our model says yes, it can.
Most landlords keep a few escape hatches: raise the rent, cut the maintenance, skim the surplus. Liberty Bee gives up all of them. We simulated twenty years, across every funding level and market from calm to crash, to find out whether that can actually last — and we're showing you everything, including the parts that don't flatter us, and where every number comes from.
Liberty Bee is a released, finished record. The numbers on these pages are final: the complete measurement, reproducible end to end from the published engine and data. Legacy numbers can be found at previous versions, and a current record of known issues with the model is available at known issues.
What we built
Liberty Bee is an event-driven Monte-Carlo engine: twenty simulated years, run across funding ladders from $2M to $20M and every market regime, from calm to crash. Over three versions we’ve run 148,000 simulations — just shy of 3 million simulated years — expanding and refining the engine based on the data they generated (that count skips the throwaway development and verification runs along the way). It doesn’t argue the idea works — it stress-tests it, and reports what happened, including the runs that died. Every number below is one of those outputs.9 How it’s built and how to reproduce it is the method page.
Before the numbers — one place, on purpose
The bulk of the data here — every market fact, every simulated year, every survival number on this site — is grounded in one real place, not a made-up "Anytown" tuned to flatter the model. Salem is the case study; the squeeze it measures — rents outrunning pay, almost nothing open, buying in taking real capital — is not unique to it. If your city feels like that too, the shape of these findings translates. The exact numbers are Salem's.
If you find yourself saying "I don't care about Salem", that's okay — we did some simulations of other regions as well and you'll find that info below. And you don't have to take the translation on faith: every regional fact in the model is a named input, not a law. The current release can load a region built from your own data — properties, rents, incomes, taxes — and re-run everything against your city. Why Salem · how to point it at your region.
The problem — and the data behind it
Every figure in this section is public data, sourced in the ledger at the end. No made-up averages.
Priced out
of Salem renters can't afford a typical Liberty Bee 2-bedroom1 — and that's already discounted below market. Below-market housing obviously helps them. The hard question isn't whether it helps — it's whether an operator can give that help away and still be standing in twenty years.
The market underneath it
This isn't a feeling — it's the ACS (the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey) and the city's own housing report. The typical renter earns about $58k3; a market 2-bedroom runs around $2,800/month4. Thirty percent of that income — the classic "affordable" line — is roughly $1,450. The going rate is nearly double it.
That's the squeeze Liberty Bee is aimed at: not the destitute — them, honestly, a below-market landlord can't reach — but the working renter for whom "market rate" quietly means shrinking your life.
The squeeze, measured
Two lines: what the median Salem listing asks, and what the median Salem renter can pay at the standard 30%-of-income affordability line. The gap is the squeeze — $836 a month in 2017, $1,172 by 2024 — and in ten years of data it never once closes.
Rent: Zillow ZORI (all rentals, smoothed), ZIP 01970 = Salem, June values 2017–2026 · reach: 30% of ACS 5-yr median renter household income (B25119) per release vintage, monthly · asking rents describe what a mover faces; sitting rents run lower
Measured renter income surged after 2020 (+57% off the trough, wide margins of error). The burden data says that isn't relief: the share of Salem renters paying 30%+ of income held near 55% through the surge, and severe burden (half your income to rent) sits above its 2017 level (ACS B25070). A median that rises while burdens don't ease is a city swapping renters in, not raising them up.
The idea, the simulation, and what it found
Before the findings: an honest fence around the claim.
First — what this is not
Liberty Bee is not subsidized or income-restricted housing. The baseline model assumes no tax credit, no affordability covenant, no government operating subsidy — because the whole point is to test whether the model itself can stand without them.
And it does not solve poverty. That's a real problem with real, established answers — vouchers, public housing, direct subsidy — and we can't match them as the model stands. The deeply low-income renter needs help no below-market landlord can provide; pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What it tries to be is narrower and testable: more affordable than the market, free of the usual extractive incentives — no rent hikes on people who stay, no punitive fees, no surplus skimmed off — and still solvent twenty years on. That's the entire claim. Someday a future version might accept vouchers and stack with subsidy; not this one, and we say so on purpose.
It’s also not a land trust or a co-op — and it’s deliberately not income-gated like most housing help. Those are real models with real answers; how we differ, why we built for stability, and who the current system misses are on the questions page — with the data.
The idea
In our original written proposal, the mission was stated simply: provide stable, dignified housing while fostering long-term community resilience.
The idea isn't to make money. It never was. Not much of a sales pitch, we know — but bear with us. The idea is to deliver immediate, meaningful relief against one of the biggest stressors in our society: housing.
The Liberty Bee model isn't about investing in housing — it's about anchoring families, preserving community integrity, and reshaping what affordability looks like. It's a non-extractive, sustainable, community-driven future for housing. It's about investing in the people.
Solvency is the floor, not the goal. So the model measures the thing that actually matters: how much better off tenants are.
That savings is real money that stayed in the community instead of leaving as someone's profit — and it compounds: the longer you stay, the deeper your discount gets.
In-kind housing help is a famously inefficient transfer — economists find it can cost a provider more than a dollar for each dollar a tenant truly values (the classic estimate is ~2.4×15). We won't pretend otherwise. What our model can measure is the straight transfer — every dollar Liberty Bee gives up in rent is a dollar a tenant keeps. What it can't measure is how much a tenant privately values that housing versus cash — so we don't fake that number, or put one on what a cash check can't buy: stability, not being displaced, roots.
The refusal
Instead
Everything is machinery in service of one idea: the value tenants and a community create should stay with them.
The exact numbers behind each — the signing discount, the reduction schedule, the credit — are below, in the findings.
Finding — the deal deepens
Your rent is frozen the day you sign — while the market keeps climbing — and the discount steps deeper at years 3, 6, and 10. The guaranteed ladder alone:
Below-market discount by tenure — the shipped 5% up front plus a 3 / 3 / 5 tenure ladder.
And because a sitting tenant's rent never re-prices while the market inflates, the real gap grows even faster than the ladder promises. In dollars, the median tenant's cumulative savings:
Median cumulative savings vs. market among households still in place at each year (corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026, $7M, 500 seeds; year 20 = the 571 households still in place at the run’s end) · rent savings only, before credits
By year 5 a still-sitting household has saved about $15k; by year 10, $65k; by year 15, $155k; households still there at year twenty, about $274k — money kept in a household instead of leaving as someone's profit.
Tenant credits
Beyond the rent discount, Liberty Bee banks 10% of every on-time rent payment into a Tenant Credit that belongs to the household. It's not cash, not a loan, not equity, and it can't be sold or transferred away.
How and when you use it: once a year you can draw up to a month's rent from your balance — either as a routine credit toward a month you choose, or as hardship relief when a month goes sideways. When you move out in good standing, whatever's left can go toward your final month's rent, and it stays redeemable for two years after you leave (an eviction forfeits it). It only ever builds on rent paid on time, and it never touches damages — that's what a deposit is for.
It's also where the model is least finished — so here's the honest split of every credit dollar earned across the corpus:16
Only about half of what tenants earn actually reaches them; a quarter is forfeited outright. We're not spinning that as a win — it's a design problem we're naming out loud, and making the credit easier to use was next on the list.
Addendum · Oct 2026
A fair question about any credit system: does the organization survive only because people don’t use it? In the record, tenants redeem about 49% of what they accrue; 24% is forfeited at move-out, and forfeited money stays with the org. So our survival numbers could, in principle, lean on tenants leaving their benefit on the table. We went and measured it: we re-ran the funding floor with the redemption dial forced up — doubled, quadrupled, and a full-use world where 95.5 cents of every accrued dollar is redeemed.21
Twenty-year survival at three funding levels as the redemption dial rises. Elevated settings are 100 seeds per level (the record point is the released n=500 corpus); redemption shares measured at $7M. Experiment corpora are provenance-stamped and reproducible; full counts and settings in the sources ledger.21
The answer: the floor barely notices. At $7M, full use costs 2 runs in 100 — and nothing at all until redemption nearly doubles twice over. At $7.5M and above, every run survives even in the full-use world. So: does our solvency depend on the credit going unused? No — except at a 2-in-100 edge, and now that edge is measured instead of assumed.
Finding — the bottom line
Put it together — below-market rent plus credits actually redeemed — and you can watch the total value kept in the community instead of extracted as profit, piling up over twenty years. More starting capital doesn't just serve more people; it keeps more money local, and the gap widens every year.
What tenants keep: below-market rent savings + credits actually redeemed (at $7M: about $3.3M rent + $0.6M credits), median organization over 20 years, by starting capital · corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026, 500 seeds per level · every level shown survives all runs · credits still held or forfeited are excluded
An org funded at the $7M floor leaves about $3.9M with its tenants over twenty years; at $20M, about $11.1M. None of it leaves as someone’s return — and that’s only the tenant side: the wages paid to local staff and the money spent maintaining the buildings stay in the community on top of it.
Finding — why people stay
The whole theory of change is a loop: a below-market deal that deepens with tenure means the longer you stay, the more you'd give up by leaving — so people put down roots, and stability compounds. This isn't just hope — below-market tenants are measurably about 19% less likely to move13. The model captures it directly: your odds of leaving fall as your deal gets better.
We're honest about why people stay — and it shifts over time. Early in a tenancy, "nowhere else affordable to go" is a big part of it: the discount is still shallow and the market is tight. But as your below-market deal deepens with tenure, the deal itself becomes the reason. Averaged across a whole tenancy, that "nowhere to go" constraint accounts for about 48% of why people stay — a large minority, but the deal itself is still the bigger half.14
But let's be real: "nowhere to go" is only a win for a traditional landlord. Our goal isn't captive tenants. Yes, it keeps people in the Liberty Bee system — but that's not why we want them here. It's a symptom of a broken housing landscape, and even where it "benefits" us on paper, we'd far rather people stay because they want to than because they have nowhere else to go.
The deal, lived
This is a single household from the record — they signed in the first summer at $2,537.03, 5% under market, and never left. Their rent stepped down three times — 3% at year three, 3% at year six, 5% at year ten, all off the original signed rent — and then never moved again, ending at $2,257.96. The market spent those twenty years drifting the other way.
Lease #4, $7.0M Salem run, seed 1, corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026 — rent path and deal terms (5% signing · 3/3/5 at years 3/6/10) read from the run's own records, final rent matches to the penny · market line: the same signed rent carried at this run's actual monthly market drift · the 10% timely-payment credit is separate and comes on top
This is the best case — a household that stayed all twenty years; the median stay is about four. But for that household the deal was worth $375,604 against rent that tracked the market — and every dollar of it stayed in their pocket instead of leaving as someone's margin. The tenant-side ledger below carries the median numbers.
How is this even possible?
Liberty Bee buys its buildings outright — no debt, no lender, no interest payment that has to be met before anything else.
That one fact turns a nice idea into a workable one. A leveraged landlord has to maximize rent and cut corners — the bank doesn't care about your tenants. With no debt, the money that would've gone to a mortgage cycles back into the reserve, the next building, and the people living there. It's also why Liberty Bee can absorb the cost of its own kindness — flat rents, deep discounts, keeping people housed — and just grow slower, where a leveraged operator would default.
No mortgage, so the money stays in the mission.
Finding — does it survive?
At fair regional wages and the current deal, this is Salem's answer: 500 runs per funding level, twenty simulated years each, every market regime. Below $7M the odds fall away fast — 99% at $6.5M, 94% at $6M, a coin flip near $5M. From $7M up, every single run survives, all the way to $20M. No wobble, no high-capital trap — a clean floor.
% of runs surviving 20 years · corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026 · 500 seeds per funding level · engine 0.6.0 · reproducible from seed · wage basis and deal terms on the method page
Finding — how thin funding fails
■ survives ■ fails · % of runs still solvent · corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026 · 500 seeds per funding level · engine 0.6.0 · hover a cell for exact figures
Thin funding doesn't fail loudly up front — it bleeds out. At $5M, 99% are still standing at year five and 71% at year ten — but only 44.2% finish the twenty (the median failure at that level comes in month 119, year 10). At $6M the bleed slows to 6 runs in 100; at $7M it stops: no run dies, at any point, ever.
Finding — reach
Every funding level from $7M up survives every run — so what does more capital do? It houses more people. The median organization shelters 94 households over its twenty years at $7M, and 291 at $20M — roughly 17 more households per additional million, at the same certainty.
Median households housed below market per organization over 20 years · corpus libertybee_fwrd_salem2026, 500 seeds per level, every run at these levels survives · engine 0.6.0 · hover a bar for exact figures
Why these discount values? We use them based on testing: they are what the simulations could support while still paying employees a reasonable salary for the region — not a number we liked, a number that survived. The versions that didn't survive honest payroll are documented on the method page.
Beyond Salem
Same engine, same deal, eight more regions — each priced from its own public data and paying its own metro’s wages. The answer to “how much money does this take?” is: it depends where.
Finding — it depends where
Nine regions, same engine, same deal, each priced at its own market and paying its own region's wages. Each bar climbs from rust (most runs die) through sand (a coin flip) to green (nearly all survive), and ends where every run survives — the clean floor. The answer runs from $6.5M (Peabody) to $18M (Tacoma at Seattle-metro wages, where survival sits at 97–99% from ~$7M but a 1–3% death dribble keeps certainty out to deep capital — high-wage metros answer in probability bands, not thresholds).
One block per tested funding level; a block's color is that level's survival rate · corpora libertybee_fwrd_* · 100 seeds per level (Salem 500) · engine 0.6.0 · staffing at each region's metro-median wages (BLS OEWS) — parts of a metro naturally run above or below the metro median · hover a block for exact odds
What the geography says
Under the current deal, six of the seven Massachusetts towns land inside a $1.5M window ($6.5M–$8M) — town choice matters less than you’d think once the deal and wages are held honest. The stretch comes from labor markets: San Francisco needs $10M, and Tacoma — priced at Seattle-metro wages — runs 97–99% from about $7M but never fully cleans below $18M. In high-wage metros the answer is a probability band, not a threshold.
We also looked at Santa Fe, Denton, and New Orleans — and we couldn’t identify enough public data to populate our set for them honestly, so they aren’t shown. Someone with other data access — even MLS access — could run their own: the model takes any region bundle built from your own data, and the wage and deal knobs are all yours to turn.
Blueprint, not a building
There is no funded Liberty Bee. No buildings, no tenants, no bank account. Right now it's a model — a rigorous, reproducible argument that the idea holds up.
Most housing pitches ask you to trust a vision and write a check. We'd rather prove the thing survives twenty years of simulated pressure first, in the open, before anyone risks a dollar — or a home — on it. Having done that, the honest answer to "so what's missing?" is one word: deep pockets.
The model runs on buying buildings outright — no debt — which takes real money up front, and we have exactly none. But it already shows how much it takes (about $7M to clear the survival threshold at fair regional wages) and that it holds. So this isn't a plea for faith — it's a number, a method, and a result anyone can check, and then capital. Nothing else stands between the model and a real operation.
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Liberty Bee was built in the open, and it stays in the open. Found a flaw, want to point the model at your own city, or want to talk about funding a real one? Reach out.