All things are systems - the Idlewild Acres case -- Roderick.Dev
← Writing Sociotechnical Systems All things are systems - the Idlewild Acres case<br>July 26, 2026 ~10 min read Thomas Roderick, PhD<br>When the System Works and the Outcome Is Wrong
Jeffrey Howard is an old friend. We have known each other for a long time, and I was fascinated to read some of his recent reporting.
He recently reported on residents of Idlewild Acres, a manufactured-home community in Morganton, North Carolina, who are organizing against substantial increases in their lot rent.1 Residents told Jeffrey that some increases were announced before existing leases expired, that infrastructure remained in poor condition, and that some people who purchased homes had not received their titles.
The experiences are fairly harrowing. According to one resident, a mother put plywood over a failing floor to keep her five-year-old child, who has a condition that makes his bones especially fragile, from falling through it and breaking his bones.
Per the reporting, the corporate owner disputed the claim that maintenance had stopped. Its representative listed completed capital improvements and said several hundred work orders had been closed. The company also said the rent increases would remain in place.
This story can be read as a dispute between tenants and a landlord. But I think that framing is too narrow, because if we dig a bit we see that it is also a story about system design.
Valid logic versus outcomes - Soundness is what matters
I’m a nerd. I think of things in terms of valid, explainable, and similar, and see systems in all kinds of things. So allow me some conceptual pointers in logic and mathematics.
In formal logic, an argument can be valid and still be unsound. Validity means the conclusion follows from the premises. Soundness requires something more: the premises must also be true.2
Mathematics has a related lesson. A result may be perfectly correct under a particular set of assumptions (axioms) while telling us very little about the problem we actually wanted to solve. If a logic proof contains no error but the resulting model is useless, contradictory to observation, or unacceptable for its intended purpose, we go back upstream. We reconsider the axioms.
This does not mean that an unpleasant mathematical result proves that an axiom is false. Mathematics does not care whether we like a theorem. It means that our chosen axioms may not describe the world we intended to describe.
Human systems work in a similar way. Our axioms are property rights , contracts , zoning rules , financing structures , corporate incentives , enforcement procedures , and assumptions about who can realistically walk away from a transaction .
Given the rules they know and understand, people then behave strategically.
Economist Douglass North called institutions the “humanly devised constraints” that structure political, economic, and social interaction.3 Elinor Ostrom spent much of her career showing that different rules, monitoring arrangements, and enforcement mechanisms produce different outcomes even when the underlying people and resources are similar.4
Lawrence Lessig makes the same point in sociotechnical language. Behavior is constrained by more than legislation. Law, markets, social norms, and the architecture of a system work together.5
The architecture matters because it determines which choices are cheap, which are expensive, and which are effectively impossible.
The architecture of a mobile home park system
The central feature of many manufactured-home communities is divided ownership. A resident may (1) own the home but (2) rent the land underneath it.
On paper, that looks like a normal exchange. The homeowner pays for a place to put the home, and the landowner receives rent. In practice, the two sides are not equally mobile.
A manufactured home is technically movable. After it has been installed, connected to utilities, occupied, and maintained in one place for years, moving it can be prohibitively expensive or physically impractical. Some older homes cannot survive a move. A destination also has to be available and willing to accept the home. The homeowner therefore owns an asset that is largely immobile but does not control the land required to use it.
Sociologist Esther Sullivan describes residents in this position as “halfway homeowners.” They receive many of the costs and responsibilities of ownership without the security normally associated with owning the land beneath a house.6
Economists Werner Hirsch and Anthony Rufolo identified the predictable incentive problem created by this arrangement more than 25 years ago. Divided ownership of an immobile housing asset creates an opportunity for rent increases because the landowner understands that the homeowner’s cost of leaving is unusually high.7
Once one party has made a large, location-specific investment, the other party can capture some of its value by changing...