!The future of housing in Kentucky --- agk's diary 5 November 2025 @ 01:51 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC in the guest bed --- Something uncomfortable is happening to college- educated people in my country, to people in the professions, people in management, civil servants in the public bureaucracies. They're becoming acutely aware that history is happening to them. History has for so long been something my country made happen to people in dis- tant lands, or at worst, something that happened to the professionals' clients, the managers' markets, customers, or the employees of their contractors. It happened to them in one way as pandemic lockdowns, furloughs, work-from-home, deaths, and disabilities rearranged their work and family lives, and now it's happening again. The rearranging will continue, one way or another. The future will look different from the past. Every mayor in Kentucky is faced with a housing shortage. For many it's the municipality's most pressing concern. At the same time, much of the population is aging as the baby boom heads into retirement and birth rates have been low for decades. There is heavy opposition to every housing project. It will congest the roads, exceed the capacity of the sanitary sewerage system, replace cattle farms and change the character of the area, block a view, bring in the wrong kind of people, the list is long. Families are less likely to include children but more likely to include nonrelative adult roommates or (grand)parents living with adult (grand)children. Old people and young people are lonely. There's a retirement "village" in my town. Retire- ment communities don't allow young residents or children. Some are apartments, some are townhomes or single family homes. They may have a dining commons, a skilled nursing or memory care unit residents can move to as they age, a gym, and other collective amenities. As the baby boom dies, these communities will get dumped by their management companies. They'll be owned by private landlords, municipalities, and co-ops. They'll begin to admit young people, and foster connection between their elderly and young residents. They'll open daycares, small grocers, bakeries, and public elementary schools. Extended families will live in former retirement communities. Some will grow seedy. Some will be up- scale. People will want more of life close by, walk- able, bikeable, car-free. This will spur municipal experiments based on Soviet microdistricts and Chinese xiaoqu. These will make residents happy and public transit affordable. These transitions will be in response to austerity, not prosperity. Some will begin as "tiny house" temporary slums for the homeless, demolished as tiny houses age and the slum becomes worse, and replaced with the nucleus of a microdistrict on land already owned or leased by the appropriate entity. New, dense construction will allow energy-saving measures like heat pumps instead of air conditioners. More forward-looking former retirement communities and microdistricts will be constructed to be as livable as possible during extended power failures, blackouts, and brownouts, especially in the hottest days of summer and coldest of winter. This involves orientation of buildings, insulation, windows and transoms, ceiling and porch fans, removable awnings, rooftop access and porches, roof- top water towers, playgrounds, etc. Some livability measures will be written into zoning codes or get tax breaks attached to them because they decrease the burden on city services. Apartments will open into stairway landings, not onto halls. This way apartments will get windows on both sides of the building. People who share a stairwell will get to know each other. Delinquents will hang out in some stairwells. Some communities will experiment with daylight-drive solar, with no batteries, for powering DC freezers and refrigerators, ovens, water pumps, and other amenities. Others will rent residents caged-off areas of root cellars. Each residence will have an emergency muscle-powered generator, like a grand- father clock with a heavier weight connected to a little dynamo to power a light, radio, oxygen con- centrator, or other small appliance in an emergency. People will often meet each other for a meal in the dining commons, have favorite tables, play cards or chess. Kids will play without parental supervision, or supervised by someone other than their parents. There will be a resident's council, informal businesses, an open mic, house parties that roam from apartment to apartment, stabbings. Far in the future the communities will open bath houses and light industries.