A lot of humans get born into high density population centers and scarcely have the opportunity to experience the opposite: low density areas. A theme in my blogs over the years has taken inspiration from Portland, Oregon's "outdoor school" institution: the public schools include an out-of-town camp-based experience wherein presumably light pollution is low enough to make the Milky Way visible.
I've tacked on the "make the Milky Way visible" tagline, i.e. I don't believe I'm cribbing it from official outdoor school literature, but if that's explicitly part of that program's mission statement, so much the better. Bill it as a psychological health requirement. You need outdoor living experience for that high school diploma.
Which brings me to our topic last night at the Think Tank (what we've taken to calling it): housing around Portland. My long term readers know I've hoped to get Portland into the "Refugee Tech" business, where "refugee" fades in and out with "camper" and "nomad".
Some people hit the open road by choice, in a high end RV they've been saving for, and now have, in retirement. Others might fancy a pre-retirement business oriented vehicle that doubles as a place to stay, the so-called "business mobile" or BizMo option. Then you get people forced out of their homes by natural and/or economic disaster (e.g. war), and becoming reliant on social engineering, i.e. back to the "refugee" paradigm.
Portland has done some pioneering work along these lines, according to our guest, especially when it's not too proud to learn from other metro areas, and not just San Francisco and Seattle.
My approach focused on enrolling people into the business of shelter testing, with ideas flowing from the prototyping front lines to the commercial market as finished products. I used to send my little diagrams about it under the rubric of Project Renaissance. This was before public-private partnerships got such a negative reputation (long story).
