Estimates range from 750,000 to over a million people living homeless within the USA. Housing supply shortage estimates are around 4 million homes in the USA. 2 of the 8 billion humans on earth lack adequate access to toilets & clean water. That is 1 in 4 humans! Why can a person live in a car or on the street, but we can’t build 200 square foot housing in most of the USA? There are multiple pieces to the housing puzzle. First is materials. Then is zoning & codes. Then we have labor. Then we have supportive infrastructure such as roads, gas, electricity, communications, water, sewer, and waste water treatment. And lastly is the actual energy to sustain it all. Beyond that extends to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) style objections. People don’t want developments near their homes that could lower the value or bring unwanted types of people. If we segregate lower income, disabled, mentally ill, and any other people then we also have to maintain all the other supporting infrastructure for them to survive. Someone has to pay for it and it often falls into disrepair if we don’t have a mix of incomes paying taxes. This keeps people in poverty & creates an us vs them mentality. I am not saying we should not protect society from dangerous people… that is entirely different. A kid fresh out of high school or college doesn’t need a big place to live & are rarely even be able to afford it. They are then pushed into having roommates, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend too early, staying with parents, or pay for more space than they need. A single adult may not even want or need a big space. We can buy a brand new 200 square foot travel trailer camper for less than $35,000… on a 15 year loan, but good luck building or renting a home like that. Trailer parks have proved for decades that factory built housing works for lower incomes, but comes with stigma, lack of walkability to necessary services or employment, among other issues. Campgrounds & motels with long-term options have often turned into alternative housing options proving people can do it, but laws prevent new developments for such uses. Society & the way we build housing must shift. It is not simply housing, but also factories, educational facilities, and entire towns. Densities, parking, supportive infrastructure, & more needs to shift as artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence. We can no longer live like we did in the past. Developments of the future must take inclusivity, walkability, & quality of life into account. Many of these ideas have existed for decades with visionaries seeking to build them, but were never actually built due to lack of funding. Meanwhile, we now have OpenAI with over $100 billion to build AI data centers that no one wants in their backyards. We have seen some mixed-use options that attempt to fix this, but education, factories, food production, & energy have not been included as core to them. There is buzz & conspiracy theories about 15 minute cities where everything is within a 15 minute walk… outside of an Orwellian dystopian fear, there is no real reason to avoid such developments. Data centers are being cancelled due to NIMBY, AI fear, & lack of water/power for massive centers that require more than entire cities. There is now an effort to create distributed data center options to solve the gaps… but they lack community focus or solving human problems. With the AI infrastructure buildout focused on housing, factories, & education… we can reshape how humans survive & thrive. We no longer have the luxury of NIMBY & must begin 100-2,000 acre walkable communities (Factory College Towns) EVERYWHERE to solve these issues. I believe that if we build 1,000 of these developments around the USA, we can absorb pockets of stranded energy that have gone unused to now power AI data centers, revitalize America, solve housing shortages, and improve quality of life.

It has been 3 months since I left Michigan to live in a tent in Silicon Valley. Here are 6 lessons I’ve learned: 1) Living homeless in Silicon Valley is better than living anywhere else in the USA if you want to be in tech. 2) Not earning an income at all is better than working a job outside of tech right now. (As long as you don’t have kids you support) 3) Millions(maybe billions) of humans are going to suffer in ways that are hard to imagine over the next decade or two. 4) There is so much happening in the world on a daily basis that humans are struggling to keep touch with reality, it’s much harder in the San Francisco Bay Area. 5) Most humans will soon be permanent low wage slaves to the few who control Artificial Intelligence. The gap between upper and lower class is widening in very weird ways. 6) The USA currently lacks the needed investment in manufacturing technologies to truly beat China.

Housing is easy. We are creating more evil by limiting housing size & location. We give criminals 3 meals a day & a roof over their heads, but an addict or mentally ill person does not get the same dignity if they can’t afford it. We must fix this before AI takes more jobs.

“you have a lot more serendipitous meetings that turn out to be valuable” “serendipitous meetings seem to be enormously important” “If you read biographies of people who have done great things, you constantly see examples of some serendipitous meeting that changes their whole life.”

San Francisco Bay Area is the most insane place I’ve ever been. On the surface, it feels like any other place. People go to work, grab coffee, talk weather, & build lives. Then the curtain slips. You realize this place runs on an entirely different operating system… A strange, isolated fairyland where dropouts control empires, trillion dollar companies are born, and connections can matter more than competence. It’s that nothing is exactly what it seems. The smartest people don’t win. The best ideas don’t win. The people who understand narrative, momentum, and perception often do. The Bay Area teaches you something uncomfortable: You have to spend time here if you want to build something that impacts a billion lives. Living in a car or sleeping in an office is not extreme here. Living in a tent doesn’t surprise people. It is not about where you lay down at night. It is about whether people think you might start the next trillion dollar company.

You see stuff like this all over California. The amount of money being spent is insane. The state with the largest homeless problem will never solve it, but will continue to spend enough money to solve it many times over.

The post is very accurate. There is a reason that the Golden Gate Bridge required a suicide net after years of being the suicide capital of the USA. I love the Bay Area and hate the lack of humanity here. “2. There are fewer mission-driven people than I expected” “6. Personally, I’ve never been more unhappy” Palo Alto is building an 88 unit facility for homeless… it has taken 4.5 years and is still not open… the costs exploded from $26 million to $37 million. Averaged out to $420,000 per unit. I can build a 3 bedroom and 2 bathroom home in Michigan (am doing multiple of them now) for less than half that and still make a profit. If you request a shelter bed, you get put on a waitlist. If you request a sleeping bag, they don’t have them. Near Google HQ, junky RVs line the streets. People live in their cars all over the place.

This is more common than most understand. I personally have met a woman in a similar situation recently. Until we fix affordable housing, this will continue. There is no excuse for this. Even addicts deserve housing, all successful rehab programs are heavy on housing support.

I did my first ever post that hit 1,000 likes. It was in a “no data center” group about building towns without modern luxuries styled similarly to older more compact towns before sprawl. People yearn for a simpler way of life, but are addicted to technology.

I just finished an hour and a half conversation that can only happen in the San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley. The serendipity of being here is magical.

This is why we are building a Factory College Town movement. We are preparing for a new kind of society where all of humanity can thrive. Humans will be able to live, work, play, love, learn, & pay-it-forward on their terms. Humans can be fed, housed, & self-actualized.

I heard 2 guys talking about taking over ALL utilities outside my gym. Everything is different here. Where else are you going to meet a founder living in a tent working to solve affordable housing? I know at least one(me).

Visited the HP Garage today. The birthplace of Silicon Valley.

It is automatically assumed that I don’t want to live in a tent. I have 4 homes under construction under my license right now… I chose this because I believe housing should be a human right. I chose this because housing does not need to be as big as laws require. The housing I want to live in is very rare, yet should be freely available everywhere. I don’t need much. I have pretty much everything I need. I am safe, but not everyone is. I have working legs, so I can easily walk to places I need to go. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be than where I am. My only failure is that I am not building housing to end homelessness. I could literally be building more houses right now… but it doesn’t provide the housing that society needs. It is still within current size laws and out of reach for so many people. I could build bigger luxury homes for more profit… it is not what interests me. I do not need a job. I do not need a home. I need to be building Factory College Towns.

I see mentally and physically disabled people on the streets daily. No one cares about them. They are on the streets because society says that you must be economically valuable in order to deserve housing. The solutions to homelessness are transitional housing and jobs for people who are not employable. Basic needs could and should be a human right, yet they are not. AI will absolutely end humanity if we do not change the way we treat our fellow humans, because at a certain point… most humans will be less economically valuable than AI and robotics.

I moved to SF Bay Area a month ago. Life shifted immediately. These are sacred grounds. Silicon Valley. I live outside in a tent away from my wife. But the investors are here. I refuse to leave without investors aligned to solve affordable housing & factory compute.