Homeless Housing Concept

Secular, Safe, Staffed by one. Come as you are, because housing is a basic need. Access granted by site voice assistant, who demands single use TOTP codes.

Current Homeless Housing around Seattle

I was homeless for a period of time in 2018. Available resources were barely enough.
There was always enough food (SNAP, rarely food banks), but I slept in my sedan until shelter space opened up. There’s a homeless shelter for men in Kitsap, but it’s a group home, with bunk beds, run by Catholic Community Services. They kicked me out after several weeks, for refusing to remove my hat during grace. I thought I was being a kind atheist by not saying: “..but there’s no god to remove my hat for :("

I drove to Olympia and landed on a program called SideWalk, that pays for one month of rent plus deposit, if you have a job lined up. Thankfully I had JUST landed a unionized IT job, so the state wrote my new room landlady a several hundred dollar check. Then I ran out of gas, because fuel voucher funds dried up. The current system is an amalgamation of bailing wire and bureaucracy that barely works, sometimes.

I also hate that puritans have infected government with the notion, that people need to live a drug and alcohol free lifestyle, in order to be worthy of housing. As far as I can tell, a huge reason we have so many homeless folks, is because the “helpers” are acting in futility, hammering square pegs into round holes. Many folks are not ever going to give up their drug of choice, and they don’t want to live under any backwards set of rules. That doesn’t mean they have to live a life of perpetual homelessness.

My Survival Cube Solution

Tiny units/rooms/cells, designed around basic survival needs. Tents into tiny houses.
Consider these over living in a tent, on the sidewalk, in a park, or under an overpass?
Having so many individual units honeycombed gives strong personal autonomy: no roommates, and no Oxford house staff or other conservative cohorts kicking you out, over backwards nonsense. A background check that doesn’t disqualify you — but house the felons near the felons, and the 24 hour party people near similar folks.
I’ve spent some time in jail, and clearly that was one of my influences here, but the key difference, is these doors keep others away from your stuff, and away from you — you get to leave whenever you want. The doors never keep the occupants inside.

These units are, or provide, over a tent or other temporary shelter:
- Dry and Warm (Forced Air/Heat)
- Safe and Secure (Strong Theft/Assault Resistance)
- Fireproof (Every Surface is Concrete)
- Improved Sleep (Any Twin Mattress, Much Quieter Environment)
- Electricity: Spaces for Hot Plate, Toaster Oven, Mini Fridge/Freezer, Microwave
- Entertainment & Office: Space for LCD TV, Desk Space for Laptop/LCD/AIO
- Legal Place of Abode (No more abrupt LEO oustings)
- Access to 24/7 Toilet, Shower, and Laundry Facilities
- Mailing Address, and Secure Package Reception

Designed to actual scale — every product type has had dimensions looked up.
Each room/unit/cell’s internal volume: 72" (6ft) wide, 101" (8.5ft) deep, 96" (8ft) ceiling.
The walls are 1ft thick, the ceilings are 8 inches thick. Easily changed, if not enough.

I’ve created everything you see from scratch, from primitive objects, except for the “low poly trees” in the roof park, the recycling symbol, and tower office desk. This is the first building I’ve attempted, so cut me some slack if I’ve left out something crucial. I have only put a couple days of work into this, and a day into this writeup.
Update: I spent two more days print optimizing the models, so one work week total.

I honeycombed 480 of these individual units into a 12 story tower structure, and then built all the supporting infrastructure around them. Someone could redesign the cubes to accommodate handicapable folks, and build a floor or a tower with larger units? Someone could also repurpose the first floor for electric vehicles like ebikes? Someone could make the rooms deeper (tower wider), so each room has bike storage?

I settled on a building footprint of 40 by 240 feet, which is exactly 1/6th of an average city block in Seattle (240 by 240 feet), according to some website. If a small single family house is roughly 40 by 40 feet, this tower is about six small house footprints. The helipad is mostly included for scale, but maybe Amazon delivery drones? Future medevac drones? Because capitalism doesn’t spend heli crew wages, on the homeless.

I also put a park on the roof because, one of the things I remember about being homeless, with no income, is there were few public places to just exist. I found myself driving to small parks, just to sit on my smartphone and apply to jobs, and that isn’t sustainable if your car breaks down once, or you can no longer afford fuel.

I’ve tried to be realistic in this building design, with load bearing columns, and hollow shafts for pipes and adequate airflow volume. The core of the building is hollow behind the rooms/cells/units, allowing for vent ducts to either be traditionally plumbed together, or perhaps poured (or 3D printed) into a precise Swiss cheese of concrete duct work (cleaned by an autonomous duct cleaning robot?), embedded deep into the core of the building?
Either way, each unit only needs two electrical duplex outlets, two network cables (one for internet, one for on-site voice assistant and access control), an air intake, and two air exhausts (from main living area, and the potentially smelly bedpan alcove), which I’m sure can be sorted out in a 6ft wide hollow HVAC tunnel, deep inside the center of the building. Looking down from an HVAC duct on the 13th floor, into the open space behind every single room/cell/unit in the building:

Washing The Masses

Rough floor plan showing bathroom, shower, and laundry, per floor.

There are multiple washer dryer combo units pictured, two (per side) are intended for daily use, while the third is a backup, when one of the primary units breaks down.
It may seem like too few toilets, etc, but I figure the voice assistant could also tell you when a shower, toilet, or washing machine opens up, or where a free bathroom is, on the floor above or below — or there’s a vented bedpan alcove, in the rooms, because sometimes you need to go right now, instead of running down the hall.

The sewage rooms contain an “auto wash” for the bucket bedpans in every unit. The idea is to give the gross filled bucket to a ruggedized washing machine, behind a security door, and take an already cleaned and sanitized bucket, from the last cycle. Once you close the door, the machine cracks the lid, dumps the contents, sprays out the bucket, and sprays a sanitizing solution, then spits out the clean bucket, to dry. Maybe even partially fill them with a blue disinfectant solution, like honeypots?

That might seem like a gross or unreasonable solution to some people, but I remind them, these folks were living in tents, and this is an urban camping/survival concept. They would otherwise be shitting in parks, in bushes, in holes, in ditches, or if available nearby, in sparse public restrooms. Residents are not in prison here, so they don’t need plumbing — they leave when needed. Adding a second bathroom on each side, instead, is also a reasonable solution, but that also means probably waking up your neighbors at 2am, when you only needed to use the bathroom. Homesteaders living out in the wilderness, still thrive with only outhouses — all that plumbing is expensive, and this consolidates all the tower plumbing needs into a single column.

Fitting bathroom/elevator layout prototype, into the remaining building footprint:

Duplicating the bathroom layout into a column, one per floor:

Expanded Communal Living Spaces

Around this time I decided that the roof park would probably be too crowded, so I added larger rounded end caps to each floor. Intended for use with folding chairs or lounging zero gravity chairs. There would be WiFi coverage in these areas for devices.
On the stairwell side end cap, there’s an alcove, between two support walls, that I would heavily ventilate (through the wall, into the hollow HVAC core), as the suggested smoking/vaping area. The folks right around the end of the wall wouldn’t be able to smell you, if you exhaled into the exhaust vents, within the alcove.
Maybe even those grocery store air curtains at the “smoker’s cove” entrances?

Since there was a mostly empty 13th floor, I decided that would be an ideal place for some huge, ugly, rooftop HVAC air exchange units (pictured below, in white):
- Six main exhaust units (3 running, 3 redundant?), for the living spaces and rooms
- Three smaller exhaust units (2 running, 1 redundant?), for the bathroom core
I also roughed out two water tanks, one main one for drinking water and showers (dark blue), and one smaller greywater tank (light blue), that is partially fed with a rain catchment system, and from roof park drainage. The greywater could be used to flush toilets, and flush bedpans in the automated sewage disposal stalls. There’s a 4ft thick steel reinforced concrete slab under the tanks, and 4ft thick walls around them. I don’t know (or care, for a first draft) if that is actually adequate to hold that volume of water.
Next to the six exhaust units, there’s a storage room for replacement parts (doors, etc).

I added two stairwells for emergency access, and added an elevator wheelhouse on the roof, so the center elevator can reach the roof. Added a roof over the elevator and stairwells — which could double as a small solar array platform. The solar array could charge a battery bank, for critical building functions like access control, which could be completely air-gapped from the power grid — doors would still work in a blackout.

Given all the rain in Seattle, I also made larger covered “observation deck” areas, on the 13th floor end caps. These areas would let you be technically outside, while being protected from the sometimes unrelenting rain.

An exploded/sliced diagram of the top three floors of the tower:

Voice Assistant Everything

While there is a single 600sqft studio apartment, between the water tanks, for one 24/7 on-site staffer, the building is intended to be largely automated and autonomous.
I’d want to start with Amazon’s Alexa code base, and perhaps re-mask her as “Ben” or Jeeves, acting as the building caretaker: “Yo Ben, open the bathroom, 362014”

There are nearly no buttons in the building. They break constantly, with constant use.
I’m envisioning a system where dirt cheap, embedded speakers and microphones (smart speakers), can handle every daily task that you would need to function, as a resident. The smart speakers are essentially infinitely reusable, with almost zero wear and tear, when they are ruggedized behind drilled steel plates (like a jail cell intercom).

Activities that could be automatically completed by a custom, on site, voice assistant:
- Resident on-boarding, checking-in (Challenge for DOB, other verifiable forms of ID)
- Resident eviction, checking-out (Integrate with Emergency Services)
- Move to different unit, in-building transfers (Temporary Access to Two Units)
- Resident “moving on up”, checking-out (Coordinate with Movers?)
- Unlocking room doors, bathroom doors, laundry doors
- Dispensing tap water into 5.3 gallon water storage cubes
- Notifying residents when facilities have finished being used by someone else
- Notifying residents of package deliveries (held in the staffer’s office)
- Timed shower activate and water temperature
- Room built-in ceiling lights on/off/dimming
- Call building management, about something else

The staffer is expected to handle tasks like the following:
- New resident orientation, or crash course using the facilities in the building
- Resident has locked themselves out, lost “door keys” ID process for reissue
- “Help someone is damaging the property, and I need help removing them”
- Replace damaged doors, monitor site HVAC equipment, monitor security cameras
- Receive shipments from carriers into secure storage area, for later retrieval

Security & Access Control

One time passwords, that are instantly de-validated, upon use.
This sounds complex to use — it isn’t. The crypto has been simplified, and can be further simplified, so that old farts, and even mentally disabled folks, can use it daily.

The $40 standalone Token2 OTP product provides the needed “door key” six digit functionality, but the same function can also be provided by any Android smartphone, which can be a cheap as $30 on Amazon, paired with the Google Authenticator app.
I think the extra $10 is worth the air gap, to keep the resident’s secret “door key” away from prying eyes — bad actors can (easily) gain access to a stock OS smartphone. However, a phone would provide additional utility to residents, such as downloading and using Android apps, even if only over the building’s (and other) WiFi networks.

The blind folks can have their smartphone or standalone “door keys” use TTS, to speak the six digit OTP, to the microphones embedded into the access doors?

Imagine the following common resident tasks:
To enter the building: “Ben, presses fob for code, 547242”
To enter their room: “Benny, presses fob for code, 603811”
To enter the laundry: “Ben, laundry, presses fob for code, 058730”

It might also be nice if there was computer vision AI security assistance, that monitored the building entrances, for suspicious items like oxyacetylene tanks, which are commonly used to cut thick sheet metal. This kills the building.

Internet Access Everywhere

I went to college for network technology. I learned about routers, switches, and servers, and eventually grew into IT Systems Engineer roles as a Microsoft contractor. I cannot imagine life without the internet. The internet has become such a staple, it needs to be available to all city residents, all the time. It’s difficult to thrive in best America, when you cannot even apply to jobs, because they’re online, and you’re not. The idea is for some residents to land jobs with living wages, and move into rooms or apartments, with nice things like running water, and a private bathroom.

Since internet service providers are advertising 10GBit residential availability, I figure one building could easily share that amount of bandwidth, on a business plan. While the top tier speed isn’t needed, dividing the cost among so many residents makes higher speeds reasonable, when it’s likely well under $5/month, per occupant. That’s a small amount of funding, for a huge amount of internet access, which provides education, entertainment, and employment opportunities, to all residents.

- 10GBit divided is 20MBit per room — or over 480 simultaneous 4K streams
- Ten 48 port 1Gb switches with 10Gb uplinks are very affordable, for 480 room runs
- Embedded 802.11ac WiFi Access Points on every floor, in lounge end cap areas
- Wired RJ45 ethernet ports in every unit, with cheap-to-replace keystone jacks
- Rooms could opt-in to site-only 1Gb LAN, for file sharing, and multiplayer gaming?

Reclaiming Highway Embankments

Another possible use for this cell/room concept, is to reclaim much smaller scale, already existing areas, under highways, and turn them into distributed housing.
Below is the first highway overpass that came to mind, in the international district. I’ve highlighted the area I’m referring to, the sloped embankment, in green:

Low effort photo composite, but that’s a smaller scale option.

That’s 12 units pictured, but you could maybe fit up to 18 in that space?
With 5-6 support rooms/doors: toilets/sewage (brown), laundry (beige), showers (dark blue), drinking water spigot (light blue), and furnace/ventilation (red). No internet hard lines in these smaller complexes, likely shared WiFi internet access only.
But otherwise wasted space, transformed into affordable, secure homeless housing.

The two tents in the original picture? Those folks could now be behind secure doors.
Plant some obfuscating shrubberies in front of the doors? Maybe camo art murals?

3D CAD Object Files

Use my designs as inspiration for a professionally designed solution?
Print out these scale models and show your representatives?

May Substack Update: I’ve since redesigned the linked files below to be 3D printer optimized, and to print without supports for the tower quadrants. This about halves the print time and filament used, compared to the original models. You now have to superglue the walkways to the sides of the towers, after printing. Included with this update is a print optimized unit/room/cell model, with a wall and ceiling removed.

The tower quadrants also now have rare earth magnet insert holes, so the printed tower model pulls apart, and clicks back together, like an anatomy model.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5907773

---