No easy solutions, but here’s one: drop the one family/one building model and facilitate other options which used to exist, like the boarding house, the decent residential hotel (Air bnb of the 19th century), dorms, and so on, all at an affordable rate. The thing that will demonstrate whether progress has occurred between 1800 and now will be whether we can do this without lowering safety standards back to 1800 levels at the same time. In Vancouver, developers put many live/work studios on the market cheap, but they did so because they didn’t have to meet the fire and earthquake codes. That’s not good enough.

Categories: Hackers