Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every unreasonable young person who refuses to accept the world as it is.

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw

Rohan read it on a Tuesday. By Friday, he had dropped out of the student government, quit the debate team, and announced to his bewildered parents that he was starting a community land trust.

"A what?" his mother asked.

"A community land trust. It's a nonprofit that buys land and holds it in trust so it stays affordable forever. The land can never be sold for speculation. Housing built on it is permanently affordable."

"Where did you learn about this?"

“They speak as prompted by their own caprices, and understand not.”

“Render continual thanks unto God so that the confirmations of God may encircle you all. – 68 – 15 June 1912 Talk at 309 West Seventy-eighth Street, New York Notes by Howard MacNutt I have made you wait awhile, but as I was tired, I slept.”

"And?"

"I don't know. But 'Abdu'l-Bahá started a school when He was a child. And Táhirih tore off her veil at a gathering of men in 1848. And Bahá'u'lláh Himself endured forty years of imprisonment and exile for being unreasonable about the truth. Being unreasonable is kind of our thing."

His mother looked at him for a long time. Then she said, "Tell me more."

Rohan had been watching the housing crisis in his city for three years. His neighborhood — a diverse, working-class community — was being devoured by development. Rents doubled. Families who had lived there for decades were being displaced. Old buildings were demolished for luxury condos that nobody in the neighborhood could afford.

The standard responses — protest, petition, legislation — moved at the speed of bureaucracy. By the time a law was passed, three more blocks had been sold.

He researched community land trusts. He studied successful models in Burlington, Vermont and Atlanta, Georgia. He read the Bahá'í teachings on economic justice — the principle that extreme wealth and extreme poverty are both harmful, that the earth's resources belong to all of humanity.

Every single person said yes.

The community land trust of Riverside — named by Rohan's neighbor Mrs. Washington, who said "we live by the river, and we're not going to be swept away" — started with three families, a donated plot of land from a sympathetic church, and a seventeen-year-old who refused to be reasonable.

Within a year, they had twelve families. Within two years, thirty. The land was held in trust. The homes were affordable. And the neighborhood, which had been hemorrhaging families to displacement, started to stabilize.

Rohan graduated. He went to college. He studied urban planning. He kept being unreasonable.

Because all progress, as Shaw said, depends on the unreasonable ones.

And Rohan, standing at the intersection of faith and action, economics and justice, youth and experience, was gloriously, stubbornly, beautifully unreasonable.

THE END

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Crimson Ark Publishing creates fiction about young people who change the rules.