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ysabetwordsmithThese are the content notes for "Without Stable Shelter."
The housing system is a mess, particularly in the affordable housing crisis. Local-Omaha wants to demolish older public housing projects without adding more.
The missing middle is the gap between scattered single-family homes and high-rise apartment buildings. It includes things like multiplexes, townhouses, cottage courtyards, and small apartment buildings. Population transect zones show the different densities, from wilderness through rural and suburban to urban.
Public housing doesn't have to look bad. Local-America often designs bad public housing because they hate poor peoplea and don't want to spend money on them. See a design workbook for ideas.
Barcelona blocks developed from a good plan gone bad, as people developed over the intended greenspace. These are some of the original shapes.
The Texas donut gives a similar appearance but is built all at once, with a central parking structure. Consider the problems of having one owner instead of many.
Understand the criteria of project success and how to determine whether a project succeeded.
Terramagne-America uses tenant satisfaction surveys to gauge building quality. A basic bullet-list survey is easy to answer answer and score, but limited in scope. Terramagne-America generally includes space for respondants to describe in their own words what they like and dislike. In this case, that's where everyone complains about the shortage of light fixtures. Analyze a more elaborate example.
Scalability describes a system's ability to grow in various ways. A highly scalable system tends to take on some sort of fractal shape. This is good because fractals are robust, appearing everywhere in nature -- they have been extensively tested and proven effective in scales from seashells to galaxies. Know how to determine whether a system is scalable and how to scale it up. Here, most pilot programs fail to scale, but there are ways to improve that.
Terramagne-America explicitly creates frameworks so that new ideas can be tested on a small scale with minimal risk. The most successful of those are offered for expansion to the next level, and so on, progressively selecting for the most robust methods and troubleshooting along the way -- sometimes all the way to global reach. In this case, housing projects are tested for usability, popularity, and durability; the best ones go into a catalog available to urban planners. It is vastly cheaper to duplicate a batch of excellent projects than to keep buying a new plan for every one. Sometimes bad projects get replicated in a fad, but they don't usually last as long. Terramagne quashed Brutalism and squiggle suburbs a lot faster than here.
Nimbies are people who don't want something built or done near them. This can keep out bad things, like a landfill; but also good things, like a much-needed apartment complex. On the other side are the yimbies who do want something. Bridging this divide can be very difficult. Ideally, you need to solve problems in a way that local people find acceptable or pleasing, because forcing things on people rarely ends well. Participatory decision-making helps raise ideas and gauge support.
Poor neighborhoods often perform better than wealthier ones in generating tax revenue for the city. Small businesses tend to be more resilient, and because they're packed tightly, more lucrative than a single bigger one. Blues Moon has apartments over a jazz joint, and it stands next to a taller apartment building, creating a walkable neighborhood (aside from the sometimes questionable safety of North Omaha in general).
F-30 is short for "fixed to 30% of income," meaning that the mortgage payment is based on the buyer's income rather than changing with markets or set at an arbitrary permanent rate. The number is based on recommendations that mortgage or rent cost no more than 30% of income. In tight markets, people are often forced to pay more, but this leaves them cost-burdened; it is a reflection of housing failure, not imprudent budgeting. In Terramagne-America, there are government programs to assist certain groups (veterans, African-Americans, etc.) in achieving homeownership using the F-30 mortgage model.
Empty retail floors look bad and invite trouble. They tend to happen because developers ape successful neighborhoods without understanding what actually makes them succeed. The empty floors don't meet anyone's needs so nobody uses them.
In mathematics, the four color map theorem states that no more than four colors are necessary to color the regions of a map so that all adjacent (sharing a boundary, not just a corner) areas will be different colors.
Creative Color Schemes has many colorful palettes including Black and White, Brown Tone, Art Nouveau, Beige Tone, Gray Tone, Neutral, Earth Tone, Elegant, and Romantic. Shiv uses these to demonstrate how to choose colors from a broad palette to create a more concise one. It's a lot faster than hand-picking colors, but he excels at that too.
Gray's apartment complex is described in "To Perceive Patterns," when Keane first visits. His actual apartment is done in the same soft shades of gray and brown with little pops of brighter color.
Explore luminescent watercolors.
An online color calculator lets you choose different schemes.
Paint With Nature is a Terramagne-American website that lets you input an image and derive a palette from it, either randomly or by hand.
Color studies use thumbnails to test combinations before making a large painting. Templates may compare three equal rectangles, three different-sized rectangles, paired rectangles, or a grid of rectangles.
Read about food deserts. See a food desert map of Omaha. This searchable map shows food deserts.
Blooming Desert is a Terramagne-American nonprofit organization aimed at creating grocery stores in food deserts. Their logo is a prickly pear cactus in bloom. They work with locals to determine what kind of foods the residents want to buy and what kind of traffic a store could support. Then they provide a skeleton crew of experienced store staff and fill in the rest with local hires. The store gradually shifts to all-local ownership and employees over a period of several years.
Farm to First Street is a Terramagne-American program run by the Food and Nutrition Service. It purchases produce and animal products from farmers for distribution in underserved neighborhoods, and also supports other ventures such as truckstands, farmer's markets, and produce vending trucks that make fresh food more available in urban areas.
The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is supposed to increase food security and reduce hunger. It's not actually very good at that.
My Diet appears in "Escape from the Loneliness."
Angel Food Ministries used to exist in both worlds, but closed down here; they survived the fraud scandal in Terramagne. They buy food in bulk, repackage it in family-size boxes, and sell it for about half the retail cost. There are no qualifications to participate or limits on what people could buy. In addition to the basic box they offer others such as after-school, fresh produce, gluten-free, specialty meats, and prepackaged heat-and-serve meals.
Devil's Food is a food distribution program in Terramagne-America. The Satanists set it up as an alternative to Angel Food Ministries. The organization buys in bulk and resells at low prices to anyone who wants to buy a box. Offerings include the Basic Box, Red Meat, and Sinful Sweets but they have no children's package.
Community Supported Agriculture connects farmers directly with customers.
"Push-to-start car" is another term for "beater car," that is, old and broken down. Certain types of car trouble mean that the thing will run, but is difficult to start, and one of the ways to get it started is to have several people push it a ways.
The housing system is a mess, particularly in the affordable housing crisis. Local-Omaha wants to demolish older public housing projects without adding more.
The missing middle is the gap between scattered single-family homes and high-rise apartment buildings. It includes things like multiplexes, townhouses, cottage courtyards, and small apartment buildings. Population transect zones show the different densities, from wilderness through rural and suburban to urban.
Public housing doesn't have to look bad. Local-America often designs bad public housing because they hate poor peoplea and don't want to spend money on them. See a design workbook for ideas.
Barcelona blocks developed from a good plan gone bad, as people developed over the intended greenspace. These are some of the original shapes.
The Texas donut gives a similar appearance but is built all at once, with a central parking structure. Consider the problems of having one owner instead of many.
Understand the criteria of project success and how to determine whether a project succeeded.
Terramagne-America uses tenant satisfaction surveys to gauge building quality. A basic bullet-list survey is easy to answer answer and score, but limited in scope. Terramagne-America generally includes space for respondants to describe in their own words what they like and dislike. In this case, that's where everyone complains about the shortage of light fixtures. Analyze a more elaborate example.
Scalability describes a system's ability to grow in various ways. A highly scalable system tends to take on some sort of fractal shape. This is good because fractals are robust, appearing everywhere in nature -- they have been extensively tested and proven effective in scales from seashells to galaxies. Know how to determine whether a system is scalable and how to scale it up. Here, most pilot programs fail to scale, but there are ways to improve that.
Terramagne-America explicitly creates frameworks so that new ideas can be tested on a small scale with minimal risk. The most successful of those are offered for expansion to the next level, and so on, progressively selecting for the most robust methods and troubleshooting along the way -- sometimes all the way to global reach. In this case, housing projects are tested for usability, popularity, and durability; the best ones go into a catalog available to urban planners. It is vastly cheaper to duplicate a batch of excellent projects than to keep buying a new plan for every one. Sometimes bad projects get replicated in a fad, but they don't usually last as long. Terramagne quashed Brutalism and squiggle suburbs a lot faster than here.
Nimbies are people who don't want something built or done near them. This can keep out bad things, like a landfill; but also good things, like a much-needed apartment complex. On the other side are the yimbies who do want something. Bridging this divide can be very difficult. Ideally, you need to solve problems in a way that local people find acceptable or pleasing, because forcing things on people rarely ends well. Participatory decision-making helps raise ideas and gauge support.
Poor neighborhoods often perform better than wealthier ones in generating tax revenue for the city. Small businesses tend to be more resilient, and because they're packed tightly, more lucrative than a single bigger one. Blues Moon has apartments over a jazz joint, and it stands next to a taller apartment building, creating a walkable neighborhood (aside from the sometimes questionable safety of North Omaha in general).
F-30 is short for "fixed to 30% of income," meaning that the mortgage payment is based on the buyer's income rather than changing with markets or set at an arbitrary permanent rate. The number is based on recommendations that mortgage or rent cost no more than 30% of income. In tight markets, people are often forced to pay more, but this leaves them cost-burdened; it is a reflection of housing failure, not imprudent budgeting. In Terramagne-America, there are government programs to assist certain groups (veterans, African-Americans, etc.) in achieving homeownership using the F-30 mortgage model.
Empty retail floors look bad and invite trouble. They tend to happen because developers ape successful neighborhoods without understanding what actually makes them succeed. The empty floors don't meet anyone's needs so nobody uses them.
In mathematics, the four color map theorem states that no more than four colors are necessary to color the regions of a map so that all adjacent (sharing a boundary, not just a corner) areas will be different colors.
Creative Color Schemes has many colorful palettes including Black and White, Brown Tone, Art Nouveau, Beige Tone, Gray Tone, Neutral, Earth Tone, Elegant, and Romantic. Shiv uses these to demonstrate how to choose colors from a broad palette to create a more concise one. It's a lot faster than hand-picking colors, but he excels at that too.
Gray's apartment complex is described in "To Perceive Patterns," when Keane first visits. His actual apartment is done in the same soft shades of gray and brown with little pops of brighter color.
Explore luminescent watercolors.
An online color calculator lets you choose different schemes.
Paint With Nature is a Terramagne-American website that lets you input an image and derive a palette from it, either randomly or by hand.
Color studies use thumbnails to test combinations before making a large painting. Templates may compare three equal rectangles, three different-sized rectangles, paired rectangles, or a grid of rectangles.
Read about food deserts. See a food desert map of Omaha. This searchable map shows food deserts.
Blooming Desert is a Terramagne-American nonprofit organization aimed at creating grocery stores in food deserts. Their logo is a prickly pear cactus in bloom. They work with locals to determine what kind of foods the residents want to buy and what kind of traffic a store could support. Then they provide a skeleton crew of experienced store staff and fill in the rest with local hires. The store gradually shifts to all-local ownership and employees over a period of several years.
Farm to First Street is a Terramagne-American program run by the Food and Nutrition Service. It purchases produce and animal products from farmers for distribution in underserved neighborhoods, and also supports other ventures such as truckstands, farmer's markets, and produce vending trucks that make fresh food more available in urban areas.
The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) is supposed to increase food security and reduce hunger. It's not actually very good at that.
My Diet appears in "Escape from the Loneliness."
Angel Food Ministries used to exist in both worlds, but closed down here; they survived the fraud scandal in Terramagne. They buy food in bulk, repackage it in family-size boxes, and sell it for about half the retail cost. There are no qualifications to participate or limits on what people could buy. In addition to the basic box they offer others such as after-school, fresh produce, gluten-free, specialty meats, and prepackaged heat-and-serve meals.
Devil's Food is a food distribution program in Terramagne-America. The Satanists set it up as an alternative to Angel Food Ministries. The organization buys in bulk and resells at low prices to anyone who wants to buy a box. Offerings include the Basic Box, Red Meat, and Sinful Sweets but they have no children's package.
Community Supported Agriculture connects farmers directly with customers.
"Push-to-start car" is another term for "beater car," that is, old and broken down. Certain types of car trouble mean that the thing will run, but is difficult to start, and one of the ways to get it started is to have several people push it a ways.
