Discovery Process

Seeing what sticks

Process #1: pitch ideas about how average people can proactively create better/more affordable housing for themselves, see how the crowd reacts

Process #2: solicit the crowd to come up with suggestions for creating housing for themselves

Process #3: validate the most popular suggestions and reactions against the what is legally possible AND commercially viable (i.e., measure the politics and pencil out various business plans)

Process #4: lobby to change land-use and building laws where necessary

Process #5: publish business plans, roadmap how to select/purchase sites, invite the people to make it happen for themselves (if they really are ready to stop complaining and start doing)

Process #6: redirect the momentum of the crowd to work towards enabling housing development.

Those ready to take on DIY development now have an incentive to see laws change to make small crowd-based housing development easier to accomplish. They’ll lobby for positive permissions to build housing, rather than ask their government to limit building.

End game?

Here’s the vision: once laws have been passed and permissions granted,

• Supply aligns with demand (1) the crowd can get to work on building the housing it wants to see at prices it wants to pay,
• Social Equity (2) the development market will be opened to participation by the crowd,
• Opportunity to Uberize Housing Development (3) a new market for digitally-enabled P2P business services––lean engineering, surveying, AR/VR housing design, lean legal transactional services–– might be able to take off in strides

Execution

To lay out the vision, one has to start somewhere to lay groundwork.

I’m in the New Haven area now while I finish my last semester of law school and I know a few things about land development in New Haven, so I might as well start here, starting by poking around at the New Haven zoning code.

Process #1

December 2019–Feb 2020 Created a survey to gauge how people felt about alternative housing types (backyard ADUs, tiny houses, bungalows). 129 respondents.

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Process #2 Execution

Feb-Mar 2020

• Survey the crowd about what it would like to do––work on getting permission for individuals to build housing for themselves, OR rely on government to eventually force developers to eventually build housing for them.
• Identify members of the crowd willing to step up and develop bungalow/ADU projects if and when zoning for them is approved, perhaps in partnership with Yale Architecture students with experience designing efficiency spaces .