The author of this site is a former military wife and homeschooling mom with an incomplete BS in Environmental Resource Management. Classes for my concentration in Housing for the incomplete degree include Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU and a class in Real Estate Appraisal.
I later spent nearly six years homeless and grabbed this blogspot site URL while still homeless, a few months before getting myself off the street by -- ironically -- getting into a hundred-year-old SRO. I lived in two different rooms in that building, one with just a sink in the room and a bathroom down the hall, the other with its own bathroom, and then moved to a studio apartment in a different hundred-year-old building.
Writing here has been informed by me analyzing those actual living spaces that I was actually living in and dreaming of something better while feeling like "This is ironic. I am trying to design something I would like to live in given my current situation and if that leads to career success and money, it will be a solution I no longer personally need because more income would also solve a lot of my problems."
I persisted in part because my interest in housing solutions significantly preceded my personal financial crisis. There is tremendous need for solutions to various issues this project is intended to address, affordable housing for some people being just one of the goals of this project.
Another major goal: Addressing the friction between people who want to keep their car and those who want a more pedestrian-friendly world. Much of the writing here grew out of what was originally a proposal to solve the problem of parking minimums strangling the historic downtown of the small town I was living in.
This note is being left here for two reasons:
I later spent nearly six years homeless and grabbed this blogspot site URL while still homeless, a few months before getting myself off the street by -- ironically -- getting into a hundred-year-old SRO. I lived in two different rooms in that building, one with just a sink in the room and a bathroom down the hall, the other with its own bathroom, and then moved to a studio apartment in a different hundred-year-old building.
Writing here has been informed by me analyzing those actual living spaces that I was actually living in and dreaming of something better while feeling like "This is ironic. I am trying to design something I would like to live in given my current situation and if that leads to career success and money, it will be a solution I no longer personally need because more income would also solve a lot of my problems."
I persisted in part because my interest in housing solutions significantly preceded my personal financial crisis. There is tremendous need for solutions to various issues this project is intended to address, affordable housing for some people being just one of the goals of this project.
Another major goal: Addressing the friction between people who want to keep their car and those who want a more pedestrian-friendly world. Much of the writing here grew out of what was originally a proposal to solve the problem of parking minimums strangling the historic downtown of the small town I was living in.
This note is being left here for two reasons:
- To give some context to people that the ideas here grow out of middle-class expectations for life from someone with firsthand experience living in affordable housing that failed to meet those expectations.
- If it gets traction and I get enough money to make my life work, I imagine some people will call me a "hypocrite" for designing it and then not living in it.