Ideas for Market Rate, Car-Optional Housing for Households of 1-3 people
In search of housing solutions for students, singles and seniors. That was an older description of the site before I moved to Ideas for Market Rate, Car-Optional Housing for Households of 1-3 people. People hear affordable housing and they think of chronically poor, underprivileged people with no prospects. They think of people they view as charity cases and, no, that's not a nice thing to say…
There are posts on Eclogiselle about homelessness. The post Addressing Homelessness is listed under the tag development.recipes and points to Project SRO. TLDR of many years of research and writing on the topic of homelessness: Trying to "help the homeless" tends to keep it stuck. Trying to reduce incidence of homelessness would get better results. Studies show that upwards of 90 percent of the…
I recently learned about cold shelves which were supposedly common before electrical refrigeration. This an idea you can potentially incorporate in the design of the building if you genuinely want passive solar design where electricity is optional. And that is my vision. I don't expect anyone to actually get it right. I expect people to read my blog and go "That sounds COOL!" and then completely…
European apartments aren't necessarily straight up better than American apartments. They exist in an older civilization and have things grandfathered in that many Americans would strenuously object to if they had to deal with this in most American cities, though I have heard New York apartments sometimes have things in common with European apartments that you aren't likely to see anywhere else in…
If one wanted to live in something akin to regular housing with running water but no electricity, some people might need to adapt a bit. I have experience having limited access to modern amenities. I slept in a tent for a few years and that means my humble abode had no electricity nor running water. I kept my hair short because I was homeless and had limited access to showers, but I have delicate…
If you do it right, residents shouldn't NEED electricity. They can get meals from eateries nearby, stay adequately warm or cool due to passive solar design, have daylighting and go to a library to charge their phone or laptop. They ideally should have access to electricity in the units if they want it and can afford it, but electricity can be entirely optional for residents if you do it right in…
Here is a screenshot of the previous color scheme for this site and below are posts with drawings or images using the same color scheme. The brown, blue and white color scheme is an important point in several posts here but the site needs to be updated and that's going away. Floorplan The Two Towers How to Use the Style Guide
If you don't see how you can make a Two Towers project affordable in some place like New York or Los Angeles but would like to build in those places anyway: First of all, pricing of the residentisl units doesn't include parking. Residents with vehicles will be charged an additional amount per parking space. Parking adds enormously to the cost of a project and a primary goal of this project is to…
I was living in Aberdeen, Washington and doing volunteer work and developing my ideas via blog. I chose a brown, blue and white color scheme because I wanted to easily make things better without a lot of time, money and effort. There were a lot of boxy brown buildings made with nice brick. I thought they were attractive. But there were all these brown buildings in a place that gets up to eighty…
I would like to see a butterfly garden on one of the rooftops. We need more pollinators and butterflies are pollinators people are typically happy to have around. This is an idea I've wanted to suggest for a long time but I'm about the worst person to write this because I'm talented at killing succulents. I'm not a gardener. So here is the possibly wrong and bad copilot answer and some resources…
I was thinking it might be cool to have two restaurants or eateries on the ground floor of the building where they had a pick up window or pizza portal style pickup oven or something like that. You would need to reconfigure the building a bit. Maybe put the rental office, concierge services and mail boxes in the middle in front of the garage so the ground floor of each tower is a restaurant. I'm…
Like most Americans, I sometimes imagine what I would do if I "won the lottery" AKA came into a ton of money. I sometimes imagine I might start a revolving fund for Two Towers projects. I'm not remotely an expert in financing of residential or commercial development but my understanding is it can be tough to find financing for mixed-use development of this sort that is part residential, part…
SRO stands for Single Room Occupancy . This used to be normal market housing but we have torn down about a million of them in the US since the end of World War II, thus it's a form of housing and a term that are both going extinct. So people on the internet frequently either don't know the term at all or they associate it with transitional housing for homeless addicts in recovery trying to fix…
Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington has just under 3,000 students and serves a region with a bit less than 100,000 people total. It is a community college but has some four-year programs. It's an important asset for a region of small towns and rural residents and has several satellite programs to better serve the region. Yet, it has no dorms. Small, affordable rental units in South…
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 653,104 Americans were homeless in 2023, which represents a 12.1% increase from the previous year The Two Towers design proposes a project with 100 residential units designed for a household of one to three people with a floating percentage set aside as vacation homes. I imagine you probably need at least ten percent vacation homes…
You need to maintain and clean the public areas sufficient to retain satisfaction of your upper class vacationers. If you don't, it may begin a downward spiral such that you can't attract upper class vacationers and then the concierge services may stop making sense, you may have to cut rents to fill the units and pretty soon it's basically a slum. If you design it per my instructions to have…
My initial thinking was that Aberdeen, Washington could support three of these projects. Aberdeen was about 17,000 people. I think you could divide total population of a city by 6000 to get a very quick and dirty estimate of potential demand for two towers projects. I would then cut that in half for an estimate of how many to START "immediately." Because it's an unproven model etc., so you should…
Project: SRO was started because I spent years homeless. I think I snagged the project name while still homeless and not entirely sure where I would go with it. And I have reason to believe that if the US built enough small residential units in walkable neighborhoods where it's possible to rent SOME of those units for around $500 to $600 for just the apartment, assuming you do not have a car so do…
If you are in an extreme climate, such as so far north that you have no daylight several months a year, passive solar design will need to focus heavily on things like thermal mass that conserves heat. You also likely need to enclose the rooftop areas intended to have plants, picnic tables and play spaces. You should hire an architect familiar with designing for such extreme climates. That is kind…
This model is fundametally different from current "standard" apartment complexes, so there are some things you will need to communicate to folks in the course of trying to get approval to build it. There are two really critical details that they need to understand: In order to resolve some issues and make it mixed income, it uses a different metric: Primary residence status versus pied-a-terre or…
Cities you can readily and affordably get to without a car are PRIME locations for a Two Towers project. This means rail, intercity commercial buses and commuter buses are your best shots. There may be some edge cases, like a bike path from a rail station in a nearby city but initial attempts to identify good locations should just start by looking for rail stations, bus stations and commuter bus…
In Atlanta, in 1960, 5+ person households were 21 percent of all households. In 2014, they were five percent. Meanwhile, 1-2 person households jumped from 44 percent to 77 percent of households. Household size (number of PEOPLE in a home) has generally shrunk since the 1960s and yet our idea of what constitutes good housing is rooted in what worked to solve our LAST housing crisis: The creation of…
Decades ago, I read a study that suggested that less than 1/2 percent of Americans were living in poverty if measured not by income but by quality of life metrics, such as meals per day and adequate housing, used to measure poverty in India at the time. This project aims to provide a high quality of life for all residents in a way that reduces the negative impacts of income inequality. As things…
No plan of attack survives contact with the enemy -- Military saying This is not your bog standard apartment complex. It is a business with many moving parts. It will be profitable if all those details get worked out, including making money from concierge services, parking fees (from both residents and non-residents) and vending machine meals . The information on this site has been researched…
My last post has me thinking more about California and I considered tweaking it but I think I have too much to say to do that. I've lived all over California, both as a housed military wife and later while homeless. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy from SFSU and I've blogged about homelessness for years. I believe California is the dumping ground for America's national…