I think for market-rate housing, I want there to be two figures, not one:
As a somewhat off the cuff guess, I am currently thinking 65 percent primary residences and 15 percent secondary residences and let that figure float between those two, at least for a while. Too many rich people and it will probably start crowding out poor people and making them feel like they don't belong there. Too few and you probably cannot support concierge services.
Supportive housing under a charitable model offers services to at least some of the residents. These tend to be services like help with job hunting and that's fine and probably necessary.
I'm not personally interested in running a charity providing supportive housing. I am interested in developing market-rate housing as a business model.
There may be room for improvement in the services offered by charities providing supportive housing and it may make sense to encourage them to experiment with adding some of the same kinds of services I would like to offer, such as meal delivery. They may handle that differently, such as offering to have meals from their own cafeteria brought up to your room, I don't know. Not really my department.
What I do know is people with personal issues need to eat well to have any hope of regaining their health, making their life work, etc. and their personal issues can significantly interfere with their ability to perform Activities of Daily Living (ADL), an industry term from insurance/medicine related to determining if one qualifies for long-term disability.
If you have enough money and the right living situation and you can't manage to cook from scratch today, well you go to a restaurant or you order a meal and have it delivered and you still get a good meal. If you are poor or live in a secured building with no manned front desk such that delivery people have trouble getting in, you may eat cold cereal for dinner because it's what you can arrange on that day.
That's not a big deal when it's an occasional thing, but it becomes a downhill trajectory if it becomes a habit for some reason. The best antidote is to remove some of the barriers poor people have to getting a decent meal.
I'm interested in offering:
Sufficient use of concierge services by well-heeled vacationers who pick up their standing Friday grocery order as they show up on a Friday evening and get the room cleaned regularly by someone else so it's all fun for them and no work will not only help pay staff so rents remain reasonable, it keeps the services themselves alive so they are available for more occasional usage by less well-heeled residents. (And they can send their towels out to be laundered on Sunday and pick them up clean again the next Friday.)
I want all units to have the ability to hand-launder clothes. This means the "bathroom sink" (even if they only have a vanity and no toilet or shower) needs to be adequately deep for doing laundry and it means there needs to be a place to hang the laundry and let it drip dry without it creating a problem.
There also needs to be a laundry room in the building, but I also want laundry and dry cleaning services available at the front desk. I want people to have maximum flexibility for both financial reasons and logistical ones.
You should have the ability to hand wash your favorite silk blouse that you wouldn't dare let anyone else touch but you should also be able to hand wash a few items if you live alone and have trouble coming up with a full load of laundry and don't want to let it sit and begin to smell or if it is late in the month and you don't have enough cash on hand to put quarters in the machines.
Ability to control keeping your clothes and other items adequately clean is a health issue and impacts building maintenance and other residents. I want there to be no barriers imposed by the building or building management. People have enough trouble keeping up with such things without additional barriers from outside sources.
Poor people tend to be risk averse and may be reluctant to use concierge services at first. It's probably not a normal part of their lifestyle.
But they may find that having the occasional meal delivered under certain circumstances lets them keep working and the delivered meal pays for itself. Or if they fall and get injured, they may have a friend or relative willing to pay for things like delivered meals or delivered groceries or sending out laundry temporarily and in poverty housing that may simply not realistically be available.
If it's available, they may use it occasionally. It will not be available if too many residents are extremely low income and there are no wealthy vacationers keeping the services active.
More middle class residents may not be reluctant to use such services but they will still have budgetary considerations that wealthy vacationers probably lack. So I very much want some of the units to be secondary/vacation residences used by wealthy people on a part-time basis to help make this whole thing work well.
Concierge services and having a manned front desk are necessary to provide some reasonable degree of security for the premises. Years ago, I lived in a middle-class gated apartment community. The kiosk for the gate was never manned, so people on foot would just wait for a car to come in and buzz it open and they would walk in.
Similarly, the two different one-hundred-year-old buildings I have lived in over the past five years or so are secured facilities with locked front doors, but there is no manned front desk to police access. Homeless people getting into these two buildings to get in out of the weather is a chronic problem in both buildings. They just follow someone through the front door, say they are visiting someone or whatever.
If the front desk is not manned for most hours of the day and does not have a view of the entrance, you do not actually have a secured facility. And if you do not have concierge services for your upperclass residents, someone at some point is just going to make extra keys for some kind of errand boy or other.
Upperclass people tend to feel like "The rules don't really apply to me." You need to get them to understand why it is in their best interest to actually follow the rules like everyone else and in this case the motivation is "Your unit is empty most of the month and probably has nicer stuff in it than other units. The more delivery people and such wandering the halls, the more opportunity there is for someone to get in who doesn't belong so they can case the joint, etc. Please use the front desk concierge services to help us keep the building as secure as possible."
- A minimum number of primary residences.
- A minimum number of secondary residences.
As a somewhat off the cuff guess, I am currently thinking 65 percent primary residences and 15 percent secondary residences and let that figure float between those two, at least for a while. Too many rich people and it will probably start crowding out poor people and making them feel like they don't belong there. Too few and you probably cannot support concierge services.
Supportive housing under a charitable model offers services to at least some of the residents. These tend to be services like help with job hunting and that's fine and probably necessary.
I'm not personally interested in running a charity providing supportive housing. I am interested in developing market-rate housing as a business model.
There may be room for improvement in the services offered by charities providing supportive housing and it may make sense to encourage them to experiment with adding some of the same kinds of services I would like to offer, such as meal delivery. They may handle that differently, such as offering to have meals from their own cafeteria brought up to your room, I don't know. Not really my department.
What I do know is people with personal issues need to eat well to have any hope of regaining their health, making their life work, etc. and their personal issues can significantly interfere with their ability to perform Activities of Daily Living (ADL), an industry term from insurance/medicine related to determining if one qualifies for long-term disability.
If you have enough money and the right living situation and you can't manage to cook from scratch today, well you go to a restaurant or you order a meal and have it delivered and you still get a good meal. If you are poor or live in a secured building with no manned front desk such that delivery people have trouble getting in, you may eat cold cereal for dinner because it's what you can arrange on that day.
That's not a big deal when it's an occasional thing, but it becomes a downhill trajectory if it becomes a habit for some reason. The best antidote is to remove some of the barriers poor people have to getting a decent meal.
I'm interested in offering:
- Grocery delivery to the front desk.
- Meal delivery to the front desk.
- Laundry and dry cleaning through the front desk.
- Sign up for maid service through the front desk.
- Possibly others, TBD.
Sufficient use of concierge services by well-heeled vacationers who pick up their standing Friday grocery order as they show up on a Friday evening and get the room cleaned regularly by someone else so it's all fun for them and no work will not only help pay staff so rents remain reasonable, it keeps the services themselves alive so they are available for more occasional usage by less well-heeled residents. (And they can send their towels out to be laundered on Sunday and pick them up clean again the next Friday.)
I want all units to have the ability to hand-launder clothes. This means the "bathroom sink" (even if they only have a vanity and no toilet or shower) needs to be adequately deep for doing laundry and it means there needs to be a place to hang the laundry and let it drip dry without it creating a problem.
There also needs to be a laundry room in the building, but I also want laundry and dry cleaning services available at the front desk. I want people to have maximum flexibility for both financial reasons and logistical ones.
You should have the ability to hand wash your favorite silk blouse that you wouldn't dare let anyone else touch but you should also be able to hand wash a few items if you live alone and have trouble coming up with a full load of laundry and don't want to let it sit and begin to smell or if it is late in the month and you don't have enough cash on hand to put quarters in the machines.
Ability to control keeping your clothes and other items adequately clean is a health issue and impacts building maintenance and other residents. I want there to be no barriers imposed by the building or building management. People have enough trouble keeping up with such things without additional barriers from outside sources.
Poor people tend to be risk averse and may be reluctant to use concierge services at first. It's probably not a normal part of their lifestyle.
But they may find that having the occasional meal delivered under certain circumstances lets them keep working and the delivered meal pays for itself. Or if they fall and get injured, they may have a friend or relative willing to pay for things like delivered meals or delivered groceries or sending out laundry temporarily and in poverty housing that may simply not realistically be available.
If it's available, they may use it occasionally. It will not be available if too many residents are extremely low income and there are no wealthy vacationers keeping the services active.
More middle class residents may not be reluctant to use such services but they will still have budgetary considerations that wealthy vacationers probably lack. So I very much want some of the units to be secondary/vacation residences used by wealthy people on a part-time basis to help make this whole thing work well.
Concierge services and having a manned front desk are necessary to provide some reasonable degree of security for the premises. Years ago, I lived in a middle-class gated apartment community. The kiosk for the gate was never manned, so people on foot would just wait for a car to come in and buzz it open and they would walk in.
Similarly, the two different one-hundred-year-old buildings I have lived in over the past five years or so are secured facilities with locked front doors, but there is no manned front desk to police access. Homeless people getting into these two buildings to get in out of the weather is a chronic problem in both buildings. They just follow someone through the front door, say they are visiting someone or whatever.
If the front desk is not manned for most hours of the day and does not have a view of the entrance, you do not actually have a secured facility. And if you do not have concierge services for your upperclass residents, someone at some point is just going to make extra keys for some kind of errand boy or other.
Upperclass people tend to feel like "The rules don't really apply to me." You need to get them to understand why it is in their best interest to actually follow the rules like everyone else and in this case the motivation is "Your unit is empty most of the month and probably has nicer stuff in it than other units. The more delivery people and such wandering the halls, the more opportunity there is for someone to get in who doesn't belong so they can case the joint, etc. Please use the front desk concierge services to help us keep the building as secure as possible."