# Use Value

> Use Value keeps competing maps visible without reducing either side to a slogan

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:forces-polarities:use-value` |
| Family | Forces & Polarities |
| Domain | Culture |
| Era | Kinship Age → Collective Age |
| Kind | metric-or-force |
| Archetype | The Tide |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Use Value is a metric or force in the Forces & Polarities family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Use Value keeps competing maps visible without reducing either side to a slogan.

## Why it exists

It exists because place is unique and immovable while law, capital, information, and human lives must still coordinate around it across time.

## System mechanics

- **Who uses it:** underwriter, appraiser, investor, developer, regulator
- **Incentives:** comparability, predictive usefulness, decision speed, auditability
- **Inputs:** observations, definitions, time period, comparison set
- **Outputs:** signal, comparison, threshold, decision input
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Use Value keeps competing maps visible without reducing either side to a slogan
- **Gift:** Clarity about use value makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When use value is treated as neutral or inevitable, its costs can be shifted to people who hold less information, authority, liquidity, or mobility.
- **Failure mode:** The failure mode appears when use value is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

- **Personal:** Notice where use value appears as a structure in your own commitments: what is held, promised, priced, protected, excluded, or deferred?
- **Business:** Use Value reveals a handoff among information, authority, incentives, operating work, and capital. Make the owner of each handoff explicit.
- **Financial:** Use Value changes the timing, priority, comparability, liquidity, or distribution of cash flow and risk.
- **Property:** Use Value changes how a physical place can be used, valued, financed, transferred, occupied, maintained, or reclaimed.
- **Community:** Use Value can create benefits inside one parcel while exporting costs or opportunity to neighbors, institutions, or future residents.

## Divination

The Tide enters the reading through Use Value. The issue is not only what is visible; it is which map of ownership, time, risk, authority, or belonging currently governs the situation.

**Question:** What is Use Value measuring—and which important reality has been left outside the denominator?

**Guidance:** Change the denominator, time horizon, and stakeholder. If the conclusion changes, the map—not only the number—was doing the work.

## Game function

Sets or modifies a threshold; players may stress it by changing rates, time, or cash flow. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **Housewarming documents Use Value.** Housewarming documents Use Value through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Mobility enables Use Value.** Mobility enables Use Value through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Use Value prices Exchange Value.** Use Value prices Exchange Value through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Use Value transfers into Utility.** Use Value transfers into Utility through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.

## Oppositions

- Use Value versus Exchange Value
- Speed versus Diligence

## Historical lineage and regulatory context

Read Use Value through the lineage of Forces & Polarities: earlier customary or local arrangements became recorded, standardized, financed, regulated, digitized, or contested over time.

Rules vary by jurisdiction and transaction. Use the cited primary sources as starting points and verify current local law, program guides, contracts, and professional standards before operational use.

## Visual direction

Text-free rounded-square enamel artifact for Use Value: a calibrated enamel field where one measured boundary visibly changes the exposed and submerged portions of an asset; vitreous midnight enamel, blackened steel, warm brass, copper accents, mortgage-paper cream, deep green, slate, and sky blue.

## Engine output / Sentinel handoff

The generative interpretation above is preserved as Engine Output. Sentinel factors: jurisdiction-specific rules, factual uncertainty. These factors request contextual review; they do not delete or silently rewrite the candidate.

## Research / provenance

- [About Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac](https://www.fhfa.gov/about/fannie-mae-freddie-mac) — Federal Housing Finance Agency; GSE liquidity, stability, affordability, MBS.
- [Comptroller's Handbook — Commercial Real Estate Lending](https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/comptrollers-handbook/files/commercial-real-estate-lending/pub-ch-commercial-real-estate.pdf) — Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; CRE lending, DSCR, debt yield, cap rate, valuation, risk.
- [Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act](https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/fair-housing-act-overview) — U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; housing discrimination and protected classes.
