60 sqm 2 storey house design

America’s housing crisis reaches across income levels and geography, but the further one goes down the socioeconomic ladder, the more dire it becomes: Currently, the U.S. is short 7.2 million homes for the 11 million residents living on very low incomes. The affordable rental market is so constrained that 71% of low-income families spend over half their income on rent. Absent any meaningful federal investment in affordable housing in the last few decades, local governments, nonprofits, and in some cases, private companies, have tried to step up, but still, the affordable housing gap persists. advertisement advertisement The solution to this crisis–like many of America’s crises–is more and better funding toward affordable housing construction and preservation, but to date, leaders have lacked the political will to demand it, says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts … [Read more...] about Elizabeth Warren has a plan to help end the housing crisis

The story of America is one of moving. A total of 13.6% of Americans today were born in another country, and most of us are descended from immigrants. This story of migration also includes moving within the country. Over the last 200 years, Americans have settled the frontier, moved away from cities toward suburbs, and migrated away from cities in the Northeast toward the South and West. advertisement advertisement This narrative that Americans are constantly moving within the country is no longer true. Over the last 35 years, the number of Americans who have moved—within their county, state, or out of state—has steadily declined to nearly half of their previous levels. Between March 2018 and 2019, only 1.5% of Americans moved from one state to another, and 5.9% moved from one home to another while remaining in the same county. Why are Americans more rooted? The decision to move is a complex one. People are often searching for better opportunities but … [Read more...] about Americans are moving less and less—and it could dramatically reshape society

We’ve been promised a robot revolution for decades. But bots have yet to infiltrate our lives at home in any substantial way. That’s probably because no one has yet figured out their “killer app,” the use case that’s so compelling that people flock to purchase a robotic companion. advertisement advertisement But a new robot called the Misty II is taking the same approach that helped make the iPhone so powerful. Instead of trying to build a bot as well as figure out everything that people might want to use it for, Misty Robotics is designing the hardware and then enlisting independent developers and other companies to create “skills” for Misty. These skills could turn Misty into anything from a security robot that roams your house, to a podcast reader that talks to you as you go about your morning routine, to a fall detector that can send family members a picture if an elderly person happens to take a tumble. That’s why creating … [Read more...] about This adorable robot wants to be as useful as your iPhone

For a certain substrata of Twitter, Tuesday afternoon felt a lot like Schadenfreude Christmas. advertisement advertisement First came the news that Jacob Wohl, an atonal Trump rally chant made flesh, created a fake company with the hilarious moniker “Surefire Intelligence” to launch a smear campaign against Robert Mueller, and got caught in part because the company’s contact number went to his mom’s voicemail. (The Coen Brothers would be hard-pressed to invent a more inept scammer.) The cross-section of Twitter resigned to seeing Wohl’s increasingly bizarre and shrill defenses of the president broke out into swift celebration. “Jacob Wohl” became the top trending topic, a peak he had likely long aspired to reach, if perhaps not in the way he finally did. As if all this weren’t enough comeuppance for one day, then came these tweets from Kanye West. I introduced Candace to the person who made the logo and they didn’t want … [Read more...] about Kanye’s done with MAGA and Twitter is done with Kanye. A eulogy for the former artist.