A lease in one's own name

A lease in one's own name waits on five things and is waited on by four. It stands in thirty of the map's forty-six rings, which makes it the third busiest step in the record.

It is also the step people arrive intending to deal with immediately, and in this map it is almost unreachable. To compare the map with real work patterns, reviewers can look at the platform's approach and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

What stands in front of it

Four hard and one soft. The four hard ones are the whole of the money family's upper half plus a photocopy, and three of them are themselves inside rings. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from UNHCR.

Nothing in this map is more comprehensively blocked. A lease requires a bank account, which requires an address, which requires the lease.

What waits on it

A registered address, a letter from whoever owns the place, the supply bills, and a letter delivered to the door.

All four are in the place family. The lease is the hinge of that family: nothing else in it can be settled until the lease is, and the lease cannot be settled until the money family is, and the money family cannot be settled until the address is — which waits on the lease.

The place family cannot be entered through the place family. Every route into it comes from money, and money's route in comes back through here.

The one soft link

The lease waits on a room for the first weeks, softly.

That marking is doing a great deal of work. A temporary room, accepted as a standing address or a point of contact, lets a lease be started before everything else is in place, and it opens ten of the thirty rings the lease stands in.

It is also the most fragile part of the whole drawing, because whether a temporary room is accepted for this purpose is exactly the sort of thing that depends on who is being asked.

Twenty days, and a year

It takes twenty days to arrange and keeps for three hundred and sixty-five.

The year is comfortable: no lap in this map runs longer than a hundred and seven days, so a lease obtained at any point in a ring survives the walk round. The lease is one of the four safe soft entries in the record for exactly that reason.

The twenty days are less comfortable than they look, because the lease cannot be begun until four other things are in hand, two of which are themselves inside rings.

Why people try it first

Because it is the thing that makes a place feel settled, because it is the step most visible from outside, and because every piece of general advice about moving anywhere treats it as the first task.

In this map it sits behind the entire money family. A person who arrives and starts with the lease will spend their first fortnight discovering, one office at a time, that the lease is the fourth thing and not the first.

The three steps that genuinely can be done first are a copy of a passport page, a qualification certificate and a copy of a birth record. None of them feels like progress and all three can be done before leaving.

What it would look like if the lease came first

Suppose the lease could be signed with nothing but a passport copy and a deposit — which is how most people expect it to work.

The three-step ring at the centre opens immediately. The address becomes reachable, which makes the account reachable, which makes almost everything else reachable.

It is a thought experiment rather than a proposal, and this record is addressed to nobody. But it is worth doing once, because it shows that the knot is not produced by any of its members being difficult. Every step in it is a fortnight's work. What produces the knot is the arrangement, and the arrangement would survive every participant becoming faster, cheaper and more helpful.

Nothing in this map would be improved by anybody trying harder. That is the most useful thing a dependency drawing has to say.

Twenty days, and four things in front of them

The lease itself takes twenty days, which is the fifth longest wait in the record. But the four hard steps standing in front of it take twelve, three, six and one day respectively, and two of those four sit in rings of their own.

So the figure that matters is not twenty. It is twenty plus however long it takes to get into a ring that has no entrance except through a temporary room.

How to read the map

No property, tenancy, jurisdiction or requirement appears on this site. "A lease in one's own name" is a role: an agreement to occupy somewhere, in the person's own name rather than anybody else's.

The twenty days and the year are the map's own round figures. And the thirty rings rest on the hard markings above — particularly on the account, which is the single most consequential judgement in this drawing and is set out, with what hangs on it, in the part of this record about the dependencies most likely to be wrong.