#i think out in the boonies it comes down to squatter's rights/who has a bigger cannon and/or more boars

[recurring-polynya]

I feel like the "officer's neighborhood" was a late-hour add on Kubo's part to avoid having Rukia and Renji living at Byakuya's--there aren't that many scenes of Gotei officers at home, but they always live at the barracks: by my memory, we've seen Isane, Unohana, Shinji, Aizen, Hinamori (by implication), and Urahara at home on base. If you count the anime, we've also seen Matsumoto's quarters in some omake about her closet space, and there was that time Renji got depressed and wouldn't come out of his room and Rikichi had to make excuses for him at the Squad Six gate. There are probably more that I am forgetting. Ukitake is the one person who explicitly does not live in the barracks, and he lives in Ugendou, which is its own thing.

One could argue that they all have quarters at the barracks and that we mostly see them at times of wars, ryouka-invasions, etc, when they would be more likely to be putting in long hours, but I actually really like the idea that maybe the officer's neighborhood was a Kyouraku-introduction?

First of all, in early Bleach can you imagine all the captains just living next door to each other??? Komamura walking out in the morning in his bathrobe to get the newspaper and Kurotsuchi is out there watering his lawn with sulfuric acid. Zaraki is across the street, waxing his Trans-Am? No. I refuse.

Secondly, I feel like the provision of an officer's neighborhood would sort of by definition make it gauche-- it's for the poor captains, the ones that can't afford their own homes. You know Byakuya's ass is not moving into the officer's neighborhood. If they tried to make him, he'd resign.

But post-Blood War, Kyouraku may be trying to usher in a new era of egalitarianism. They've lost a huge chunk of the Gotei, and in all likelihood are recruiting heavily from the Rukon. The captains may get along like a bunch of wet cats, but the vice-captains are largely very young and hip and love free housing. (Please show us Hisagi's house. I need to see Hisagi's house so, so badly). One of my favorite older (as in, written in 2010) fanfic series, Lull, is about Kyouraku and Ukitake engineering Rukia and Renji's marriage as a symbolic cross-class gesture to show the Gotei is going in a new direction after the replacement of the Central 46. I feel like creating an officer's neighborhood and talking the newlywed First Daughter of the Kuchiki into being one of the founding residents has much the same idea to it.

I don't think you're supposed to operate businesses out of the officer's neighborhood, but Ikkaku just runs his dojo out of his house. I'm sorry, I am just obsessed with Ikkaku owning a house and like, using his carpentry skills. Yumichika definitely lives there, too, right? Kubo wouldn't have shown him there at like, 9 in the morning if he wasn't trying to imply that they're married now, right? Do they have a big Live, Laugh, Love wall decal over their couch? I need to know these things, Kubo.

This probably requires a much longer, sprawling post (the number of tentacles increased exponentially every 2 seconds as I was thinking about this) but despite Gotei captains making good money and having fairly high social standing, I feel like land prices must be set artificially, astronomically high so that no one but the already-landed nobility [or a governmental entity, lie the Gotei] could possibly ever own anything. That 'officer's neighborhood' or whatever it is is cushy, but it's also technically just a reserve the nobility has consented to so that there's no reason for these people to live anywhere else (unless they already have property by virtue of being noble). Not sure how this works for commercial leases--are they subsidized by the 46? or does running a business require you to have some kind of arrangement with a noble family. DOES SILVER DRAGONFLY LEASE FROM THE KUCHIKI.

I'm not sure how this would work for Rukongai (except that surely it's very controversial to be buying/selling parcels in Rukongai to begin with, many considering it a foolish audacity to assume such a place can be owned) but I imagine that at the very least the property taxes (or whatever payments/responsibilities inhere in "ownership" in Rukongai, re: assuming responsibility for whatever shit happens out there/keeping it Hollow-controlled, etc.) present a functional barrier to ownership for most individuals.

The generational wealth gap (mostly in terms of having family vs. having no family, but also I guess in terms of shinigami who are really old vs. those who are not) must be bananas, too. But NO, NO, STOPPING, this post was supposed to be 2 sentences about Seireitei land prices and it's already about seventy other things. It's 9AM stopping STOPPING