!Future housing problems in Kentucky --- agk's diary 7 November 2025 @ 03:04 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC in kitchen while first daughter refuses to sleep --- In my last diary entry I wrote about the future of housing in Kentucky. It may have sounded like a cakewalk. In fact the instability in the next decade will be rough, as realities, regulatory frameworks, budgets, and the interests of various social classes construct that future. The current institutional human warehousing arrange- ment will certainly continue for some time. Hundreds of thousands of adult and child Kentuckians live fulltime in a county jail, sober living, group home, nursing home, residential treatment facility, domes- tic violence shelter, prison, or immigrant detention facility. Hundreds of thousands more are frequent guests in medical, detox, or psychiatric hospital beds, homeless shelters, and county jails. There are two movements acting on these people, who I guess are more than 10% of our population. The institutionalized population increased with big money making drug treatment a profitable enterprise, and with the industry in housing prisoners from other states. Aging populations with poor social and economic supports, anti-camping laws, and the possibility that some administration might want to punish Kentucky like they punish Democrat cities with mass immigrant detention all militate the same way. Destabilization of the welfare state will institut- ionalize some people and deinstitutionalize others. Pressures to decrease state budgets, closing rural hospitals, the end of opioid settlement money, political retaliation against the Democrat-linked nonprofit sector, will also shake up institutional housing. Some institutional settings will decline in dire ways. Understaffing will lead to an increase in outrageous deaths until one becomes a public scandal. Absent management will result in increases in mold, undone repairs, and shoddy construction. The same thing will happen in apartment buildings, retirement communities, motels, and the handful of "tiny home" communities that spring up. There will be several catastrophic fires, and an increase in informal management by gangs, mega- churches, and formal or informal providers of social services. A tornado will turn devastating when it hits a sheet-steel pole barn where over a hundred people were living in conditions the public will discover from the few survivors. These events will occur amid central Kentucky continuing to be a boomtown destination for upper- middle class people fleeing anxieties or realities of coastal environmental disasters, paranoia about surveillance, liberal trans brain-washing, screen addiction, ultra-processed food, and unaffordable home and land prices. Many will continue to buy marginal land, seeking a pioneer homesteader dream of isolated hardscrabble living and "community." Property taxes will keep being turned into indust- rial parks with a combination of reasonable light manufacturing of glass and car parts and bubble- riding grift like battery plants, AI data centers, and lithium and rare earths refining. Homesteaders will ineffectually resist the industrial growth they finance. More importantly, while much of the new light industry will require little in the way of labor, it will draw working Kentuckians from the increasingly unaffordable countryside, collapsing its remaining collective institutions. New housing construction won't keep pace with the urbanizing "influx," as it will be called. People will live in overcrowded houses. In order to escape anti-camping ordinances, weird informal housing arrangements will emerge. People will be found living in abandoned critical access rural hospitals, unfinished data centers, and former drug treatment houses. Deep recession cycles will cause contagious loan defaults, foreclosures, car repo- sessions. Jails will beg counties for more money. The issue will come to be called "slum prevention." Some informal living arrangements will be permitted, given adherence to certain rules, and the making of certain payments. These early experiments will mostly be life as usual, but a few "walled jungles" will become notorious blights that municipalities battle and demolish. "Jungles" will overwhelmingly be operated by national and international real estate goliaths like Greystar, Cortland, and Mid-America Apartment Communities. These colluding, price-fixing absentee operators won't be outlawed (they're bigger and better-resourced than any Kentucky county or city), but they'll have a ceiling placed on how much of the rental market they can monopolize. In some cases, they'll be allowed to operate 50% of a former retirement community while the local gentry rental monopolist or housing authority operates the other 50%. Battles with these companies will consume a lot of lawyer fees and campaign contributions. Early experiments will also produce the insight that former retirement communities and institutional settings repurposed as mixed-age freewill housing must be promiscuously connected to the street grid and mixed-income. Worker housing must have walkable access to recreation, food, laundry, daycare, school, and some jobs (even as many residents must take mass transit to service industry or light manufact- uring jobs, or telecommute to office jobs). This is what prompts the study of Soviet microdistricts. Green spaces, parks, and playgrounds will be managed by the Parks Department and all open to the public. Some five-story Khrushchevka-style apartment blocks will be built on underused, deteriorated parking lots of old shopping malls beset with vacancies. The mall will get new life hosting a grocery store, day- care, church, social center, hairdresser, cafeteria, and other amenities used by the apartment-dwellers. A flurry of tax breaks, incentives, bond issuances, zoning changes, regulation placing responsibility for low-income workers and destitute people on builders of the heavily incentivized new housing, and interest rate changes will produce a speculative boom in new construction. Panelized apartment construction will temporarily employ a lot of people, who will form a political bloc for a time. Some mass housing won't be complet- ed before the bottom falls out of the market. Some will in fact overstress the sanitary sewer system, electricity grid, etc. It will change the character of small and big Kentucky cities. It will be the nucleus of a common way of living in this state for the half-century following its construction.