---
title: "the home you won't pin"
canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/the-home-you-wont-pin
markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/the-home-you-wont-pin.md
subtitle: keep the exact spot private. name the place it belongs to.
category: philosophy
---

# the home you won't pin

*keep the exact spot private. name the place it belongs to.*

You can share a place you love without revealing where you live. Name it at the scale you are comfortable with: the town, the valley, the watershed. For much of what matters about a place, that is the honest scale anyway.

When we asked people for a place they care about, several of the answers were homes. And some of them, reasonably, hesitated.

The water, the slope, and the trees around a home already exist and already work, whether or not anyone pins the house. Ensurance is how the place someone names, at the right scale, gets funded to keep working. It is not the home.

## what people told us

Walt skipped his own land and picked a public waterfall and swimming hole nearby, so he wouldn't give away where he lives.

Hal asked, before answering, whether a public pin would be tied to his name.

Kate named her family's farm, the one with the lions. We offered to keep the location general, and that was the right call.

Matt named his family's home in the countryside. We asked whether it was fine to show publicly, or better to show the watershed instead.

Every one of those is a good instinct. A home is personal. A pin is precise. Those two things don't belong together in public.

## the watershed is not a compromise

When you zoom out from a home to its watershed, you don't lose what matters. You usually find it.

The well depends on the groundwater the land above it recharges. The creek in the yard depends on the slope above. Whether the fire reaches the house depends on the land around it. Whether the basement floods depends on what happens upstream. The home is one point in a system, and the system is where the care can do the most.

:::johnson
**the honest scale for what you love is often the watershed.**

Name the town, the valley, or the river instead.

[name your place →](/place?from=guide)
:::

## you might be thinking: then why ask at all?

Because the answer still tells us something nobody else can: that this place, at this scale, matters to someone. That is the start of everything else: what it depends on, who already looks after it, what would help.

You never have to give the house.

## how we handle a home answer

On [ensurance](/place?from=guide), you can type a town, a valley, or a river instead of tapping the map. We look a typed name up to find it on the map. A tap sends us the exact spot and names the place by its watershed, or by its ecoregion, or by its coordinates if neither is found. If the spot is your house, type over the name before you send it. A link to the question shows only the question. A link to a page you keep shows the place as you named it, never your name or your reason, so name it at the scale you want shown. You can answer without an account, and leave an email only if you want to keep the page. Your answer goes to our team, and your reason is not published.

## frequently asked questions

### how do you share a place without revealing your home?

Name the town, valley, river, or watershed instead of the exact point. Much of what affects a home plays out at that larger scale: its water and its flood risk at the scale of the watershed, and fire at the scale of the surrounding landscape.

### what is a watershed?

The area of land that drains to the same river, lake, or creek. Rain that falls anywhere in it ends up in the same water, so what happens upstream affects everything downstream.

### do you have to give your name to answer?

No. You can answer and look around without an account. If you want to keep your page and see what changes, you can leave an email.

*Names changed for privacy.*

## the series

1. [the one question that gets people to care about a place](/guide/the-one-question-that-gets-people-to-care-about-a-place?from=guide) (read first)
2. [the waterfall that asked a question back](/guide/the-waterfall-that-asked-a-question-back?from=guide)
3. [far away is still specific](/guide/far-away-is-still-specific?from=guide)
4. [the place that's mostly gone](/guide/the-place-thats-mostly-gone?from=guide)
5. **the home you won't pin**