You cannot fully price real estate without pricing history.
Not just architecture. Not just infrastructure. But what the ground has endured.
Feng shui, at its deepest level, is simply the study of whether a place is still metabolizing its past—or whether the past is still metabolizing the present.
What has happened on land. What has soaked into it. What never fully leaves.
Land keeps score.
Human beings have an almost religious belief that time erases everything.
That if enough years pass, the ground forgets.
But history suggests the opposite: places remember longer than people do.
Wars do not end cleanly. Famines do not dissolve when food returns. Genocide does not vanish when borders are redrawn. Democide—death by state policy—doesn’t “move on” when regimes fall. Something remains embedded in the physical and psychological landscape.
You can feel it in certain regions without knowing the history.
A heaviness.
A stuckness.
A looping quality, where progress seems to stall or reverse.
This isn’t mysticism—it’s pattern recognition.
Older regions with dense histories of violence often display a strange inertia.
Cycles repeat.
Institutions rot faster.
Trust decays quicker.
Energy leaks out instead of compounding.
Even when resources exist, outcomes lag.
Compare that to younger countries or newer cities—places with less accumulated trauma in the soil. They often feel lighter. More mobile. Less burdened by ghosts. Not perfect, not innocent—but less saturated.
Take parts of the Caribbean.
The natural beauty is overwhelming, yet many islands still carry a psychic undertow from centuries of slavery, extraction, and dispossession. You can’t fully explain persistent dysfunction with economics alone.
Something deeper was carved into the land when human beings were treated as inventory. Or consider regions that have been perpetual battlegrounds.
Century after century of invasion, massacre, famine, collapse. They don’t just suffer material loss—they inherit structural exhaustion.
The land itself becomes associated with survival rather than creation.
From a feng shui perspective, this is karmic energy—but stripped of spirituality, it’s closer to historical load-bearing. How much unresolved violence a place is still carrying.
Real estate investors talk endlessly about zoning, yield, and cap rates. Almost no one talks about historical entropy. Yet it shows up everywhere:
Cities that never quite regenerate despite repeated capital injections
Neighborhoods that cycle through booms and busts without stabilizing
Regions where corruption feels baked-in rather than incidental
Where there has been extreme evil, extreme extraction, or extreme suffering without reconciliation, the “flow” remains impaired. Not forever—but longer than markets are willing to admit.