Beyond Public and Private: What Are Plural Goods and Why Do They Matter?

March 20, 2026 · 8 min read

There's a community garden on the corner of 7th and Lotus in South Central Los Angeles. It's not public — you can't just walk in. It's not private — no single person owns it. It belongs to about 350 families, mostly Latino immigrants, who tend their own plots, share tools, grow food for their households, and build community over rows of cilantro and nopal cactus.

This garden doesn't fit into the neat categories economists use. It's not a “public good” like national defense that benefits everyone equally whether they contribute or not. It's not a “private good” like a pair of shoes that only one person can wear. It's something in between — shared among specific people, to different degrees, based on their participation and commitment.

Most of the things communities actually care about fall into this in-between space. And our existing tools for governance — pure markets on one end, pure democracy on the other — don't handle it well.

The Things That Don't Fit

Think about the things your community shares. A mutual aid fund that helps members facing emergencies. A neighborhood park maintained by local volunteers. A food co-op where members pay dues and share bulk purchasing power. A tenant union that collectively bargains with landlords. Local journalism that covers your city council meetings.

None of these are purely public. The mutual aid fund helps its members, not everyone on Earth. The food co-op serves people who join and contribute, not random passersby. The tenant union fights for its members' buildings, not all tenants everywhere.

But they're not purely private either. The community garden benefits the whole neighborhood through green space, even if only members tend plots. The local newspaper informs voters who never subscribe. The mutual aid fund strengthens the social fabric in ways that extend far beyond its direct recipients.

These are plural goods — shared resources that benefit specific groups of people to varying degrees. And they're everywhere. In fact, they might be the most important category of thing in civic life, and we barely have language for them.

Why Markets and Democracy Both Fail Here

Markets are great at managing private goods. If you want shoes, you buy shoes. The price signal tells producers how many shoes to make. Supply meets demand. Simple.

Democracy (in theory) is good at managing public goods. Everyone votes on whether to fund national defense, build highways, maintain public libraries. One person, one vote. The majority decides.

But plural goods break both systems. If you try to manage a community garden through pure market logic, the wealthiest members buy the best plots and everyone else gets squeezed out. If you try to manage it through pure democracy, people who never garden get equal say in how plots are allocated, and the dedicated gardeners who maintain the space get overruled by people who don't show up.

Food co-ops face this constantly. The Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn has over 17,000 members. Running it through market logic would mean richer members could buy more influence. Running it through pure one-person-one-vote democracy means the member who shops once a month has the same say as the member who works extra shifts and serves on committees. Neither captures the reality of how people actually relate to the co-op.

The Governance Gap

This governance gap has real consequences. The South Central Farm — that beloved community garden in LA — was bulldozed in 2006 because the land was privately owned and the farmers had no formal governance power over it. The market decided: the landowner sold, and 350 families lost their plots. A plural good governed by private property rules.

On the flip side, public housing projects managed through government bureaucracy have struggled for decades because residents have no governance power over their own living conditions. The decisions are made by city agencies that don't live there and don't answer to residents directly. A plural good governed by public administration rules.

Tenant unions like the Los Angeles Tenants Union have emerged precisely to fill this gap — creating collective governance for a good (housing) that is neither purely public nor purely private. But they operate with minimal tools: meetings, petitions, protest. They lack formal mechanisms to express how much different members care about different issues, or to allocate collective resources based on nuanced preferences.

Governance That Matches the Good

Plural goods need plural governance — systems that let people express varying degrees of care and commitment, not just binary in-or-out membership. This is what community currencies make possible.

When a community has its own currency with a commitment mechanism, members can express exactly how much they care about the community by how much they stake. Someone who commits deeply gets more governance weight — but with diminishing returns, so they can't dominate. Someone who participates lightly still has a voice, proportional to their involvement. The governance mirrors the actual structure of the good: shared among specific people, to different degrees.

For a community garden, this means the families who tend plots every week have the most say, but neighbors who benefit from the green space and occasionally volunteer also participate. For a food co-op, the members who work extra shifts and serve on committees naturally earn more governance weight, while casual shoppers still have a proportional voice. For a mutual aid fund, the people who contribute regularly and help distribute aid have more influence over how the fund operates, but everyone who's committed anything has standing.

Building an Economy for Shared Things

The reason this matters goes beyond any single community. Our economy is built on two models: private property managed by markets, and public services managed by governments. Everything that falls in between — co-ops, mutual aid, community land trusts, neighborhood associations, tool libraries, childcare collectives, community broadband — has to jerry-rig governance from tools designed for something else.

Community land trusts like Dudley Neighbors Inc. in Boston have pioneered alternative ownership models for land, keeping it permanently affordable by taking it off the speculative market. But they govern using traditional nonprofit board structures that weren't designed for the nuanced, participatory governance that plural goods demand.

Goodkeep is built for this in-between space. It gives communities a native way to manage shared resources with governance that matches how people actually relate to those resources. Not one-dollar-one-vote (markets). Not one-person-one-vote (democracy). But commitment-weighted governance with diminishing returns — a system where your voice is proportional to your genuine stake in the outcome.

The community garden, the mutual aid fund, the food co-op, the tenant union — these are the institutions that actually hold communities together. They deserve governance tools as sophisticated as the ones Wall Street uses for private assets and Washington uses for public policy. Plural goods deserve plural governance. And now they can have it.