Latest news with #TowerofBabel
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Is Utah always best, or maybe just a little arrogant sometimes?
The Capitol in Salt Lake City is pictured on Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch) Businessman and Utah Senate President Stuart Adams recently reminded America's other 49 states that 'Utah is the greatest state in the nation' due to its high ratings in 'management, the economy, and happiness.' Not only that, but the 'Rising Utah' project plans to grow Utah economically from being the current 'Crossroads of the West' (the title of which was already claimed by Indiana) to being the 'Crossroads of the World' just in time for the 2034 Winter Olympics games here. In his annual State of the State speech in 2024, Gov. Spencer Cox adopted a modernist Tower of Babel orientation. He said, 'Now is a time for building,' and 'We're not done doing big things. And we're not done building.' The key to Utah success is not education, apparently, but building: 'For 180 years and counting, Utahns have been building our way out of problems, even when things looked impossible.' In another nod to Utah's greatness, he said, 'Our home has become the envy of the earth.' However, Utah's young people, like elsewhere in the country, don't know much about how to work, having never seen or experienced a family farm in their lives. Nor do many high school graduates even want to work. Many are depressed and anxious and addicted to screen time. Wages are low; banks charge incredibly high interest rates on the working poor; corporations act like robotic authoritarian managers of worker lives; and many young people are afflicted with mental health issues keeping them from being productive workers. Too many lack college degrees and technology skills. The Salt Lake Chamber adds a lack of sophisticated workforce training, out of control housing prices, transportation shortfalls, and expensive energy to that list of challenges. How great is it to be a little bit better than one's neighbors at rowing a lifeboat if one is on the sinking American Titanic? Utah's state motto, 'Industry,' seems well tailored to its current boasting about being the best economy now and forevermore. On the other hand, we would be wise to learn from the state mottos of other jurisdictions across the country. Missouri has one particularly well suited for Utah to learn from: 'The welfare of the people is the highest law.' Utah has an aggravated problem of homelessness, poor historical commitment to civics education, and progress-blocking monopolies in its communications industries and political parties all harming the general welfare. North Carolina's motto could be put to good use in Utah: 'To be, rather than to seem.' In other words, let your actions do the talking, rather than constantly boasting of greatness. How about a little humility, Utah, rather than constantly publishing political administration mottos like 'Life Elevated,' and 'Keep Utah Great.' How about Oregon's motto, 'She flies with her own wings.' Wouldn't it be nice if Utah made it easier for women to get involved in leadership in corporate, government, and church affairs? Women have wings to fly if we just give them a runway to take off from. Instead, Utahns subscribe to the idea that 'childless cat ladies' are the bane of American life. They must be barefoot and chained to the refrigerator to be effective women. It might be a source of pride to point out as our local media does that Utah leads the nation in Halloween decorations, but is that the best way for women to be spending their time? Maryland's motto would be a good look for Utah if we could ever climb off our high horses: 'Strong deeds, gentle words.' A lot less bragging, more humility, and a lot more results would go a long way toward getting things done. Wouldn't it be nice to see not nearly so many Republican party advertisements of election candidates pointing rifles, firing them off into the blue, and reloading. 'Gentle words' people, not fireworks displays and visions of Second Amendment grandiosity. My grandmother has some advice for Utah's political leaders today. As a young woman at the turn of the 20th century over a hundred years ago, she sang in the Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City. She married an Idaho college graduate and moved back east where the couple got involved in worldly national corporate economic affairs on Wall Street in New York City. She often would say, 'If I could buy him for what he's worth, and sell him for what he thinks he's worth . . .' There are plenty of social issues to bring Utah down to earth, if it ever realizes its current value is not as great as it thinks: teen suicide; high divorce rates; a focus on luxury housing rather than affordable housing; what to do about gun control; a civically underinformed higher education system; plunging Medicaid availability; a dearth of union collective bargaining; how to humanely handle people in the country without documentation who commit crimes; whether to be banning books or tolerating them; how to deal with the current philosophy of making vaccines voluntary rather than mandatory; and how to build back trust in all three branches of government. Folks, 'The welfare of the people is the highest law.'
Herald Malaysia
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
Pope Leo XIV: News media should foster peace and disarm words
Pope Leo XIV meets with media professionals in Rome to cover the papal election, and urges them to serve truth and promote peace, saying communication helps create a society's culture. May 13, 2025 Pope Leo XIV holds an audience with representatives of the media in Paul VI Hall (@Vatican Media) By Devin Watkins Only four days have passed since his election to the papacy, and Pope Leo XIV made it a point to hold an audience with the men and women who were in Rome to report on the death of Pope Francis, the conclave, and the first days of his own ministry. He met on Monday with media professionals in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall, and thanked reporters in Italian for their tireless work over these intense few weeks. Fostering peace The newly-elected Pope began his remarks with a call for communication to foster peace by caring for how people and events are presented. He invited media professionals to promote a different kind of communication, one that 'does not seek consensus at all costs, does not use aggressive words, does not follow the culture of competition, and never separates the search for truth from the love with which we must humbly seek it.' 'The way we communicate is of fundamental importance,' he said. 'We must say 'no' to the war of words and images; we must reject the paradigm of war.' Solidarity with persecuted journalists The Pope went on to reaffirm the Church's solidarity with journalists who are imprisoned for reporting the truth, and he called for their release. He said their suffering reminds the world of the importance of the freedom of expression and the press, adding that 'only informed individuals can make free choices.' Service to the truth Pope Leo XIV then thanked reporters for their service to the truth, especially their work to present the Church in the 'beauty of Christ's love' during the recent interregnum period. He commended their work to put aside stereotypes and clichés, in order to share with the world 'the essence of who we are'. Our times, he continued, present many issues that are difficult to recount and navigate, noting that they call each of us to overcome mediocrity. Facing the challenges of our times 'The Church must face the challenges posed by the times,' he said. 'In the same way, communication and journalism do not exist outside of time and history. Saint Augustine reminds of this when he said, 'Let us live well, and the times will be good. We are the times'.' Pope Leo XIV said the modern world can leave us lost in a 'confusion of loveless languages that are often ideological or partisan.' The media, he said, must take up the challenge to lead the world out of such a 'Tower of Babel,' through the words we use and the style we adopt. 'Communication is not only the transmission of information,' he said, 'but it is also the creation of a culture, of human and digital environments that become spaces for dialogue and discussion.' AI demands responsibility and discernment Pointing to the spread of artificial intelligence, the Pope said AI's 'immense potential' requires 'responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity.' In conclusion, Pope Leo XIV repeated Pope Francis' Message for the 2025 World Day of Social Communication. 'Let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred,' he said. 'Let us disarm words, and we will help disarm the world.'--Vatican News
Forbes
11-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
This Week In AI: Walmart Sets Fashion Trends Before They Ever Happen
AI is transforming the worlds of fashion and retail. Welcome to my first installment of this new series. The rationale behind it is simple. AI is evolving so rapidly—and with such seismic effects on business and society—keeping up is no longer optional. In that spirit, here are some of the top stories and why they matter to you. The Story: It's Monday morning. As an AI-powered recruiter you work smarter, not harder. You log into your company's dashboard on your phone. It tells you three critical roles have been sourced, vetted, and scheduled for interviews—all without a single direction from you. What happened? First your AI agent reviewed your client's needs. Next, another AI agent culled candidates off LinkedIn using live market data. Yet another AI agent background-checked those candidates, clearing the top picks. Importantly, none of these agents were built by the same company. In the past this would be a problem. They wouldn't be able to 'talk' to each other. Not anymore—enter Agent2Agent (A2A), Google's new open protocol. Why It Matters: A2A gives AI agents a shared language. Suddenly, bots can communicate and collaborate across platforms like never before. Welcome to the Internet for AI workers. AI agents from Salesforce, PayPal, SAP, and 50+ others can now sidestep the old Tower of Babel problem. To put it another way: They now speak the same operational tongue. Moving forward, agents won't just automate tasks within their own spheres. They will form multi-agent swarms much like The Avengers, solving complex, cross-platform problems in real time. Just don't let them drop the Infinity Stones into the wrong hands. The Story: What if future fashion could be predicted with AI oracle abilities? Here's how it will work. A major clothing label like Sonoma decides it cannot waste any more money as clothes linger for ages on packed racks. After all, weeks—if not months or even years—can elapse between the moment a fashion influencer drops a viral video and the time it takes to get product(s) to stores. By then a fashion trend will have died—and with it—revenue. This is the problem Walmart's new AI tool, Trend-to-Product solves. It compresses design and development timelines. Now instead of waiting for fashion trends or even chasing them, the massive retailer is setting them, combining fast-fashion alacrity with data-driven precision. If we accept the premise AI now knows our tastes better than we do, it's all about giving customers what they want—before they even know they want it. Why It Matters: Again, Walmart's Trend-to-Product AI Tool works proactively. How? It scours social media, search trends, and purchasing data to act as a modern fashionista Cassandra. Its crystal ball discerns patterns to predict what styles will blow up—then guides the requisite design, sourcing, and inventory decisions in double time. Years ago, Walmart adapted and revolutionized Just-In-Time (JIT) delivery for retail, making them a global logistics powerhouse. Now, they're evolving again to speed up conversion rates. Their AI tool portends a next level shift in retail agility. Clothing manufacturers can now glimpse into the future, enabling unprecedented go-to-market nimbleness. Imagine cutting your timetable from six months to six weeks. It mitigates the risk of overproduction and unsold inventory—long the albatross around so many retailers' necks. More, it enables hyper-responsiveness to consumer behavior, enabling businesses to capitalize on fashion's fickleness with minimal lag. Where will predictive analytics go next? My money's on entertainment. What if prescient AI could suggest the next big movie based on scouring the zeitgeist for a wave before it crests? The Story: Everyone knows government moves at glacial speed. That's why no one at the Department of Transportation expected their backlog of infrastructure grant applications to get through review without it taking months. And months. That was until a newly appointed Chief AI Officer took the reins. We'll call him Chuck. In the name of efficiency, Chuck rolled out an AI protocol that slashed review times by 80%. Suddenly, applications were flying by, getting stamped good-to-go or unapproved in weeks, if not days. Meanwhile, across town, the Department of Health and Human Services had its own systemic problems. Medicaid fraud patterns continue to proliferate, escaping the notice of human workers doing their best to spot such trickery. That was until a newly appointed Chief AI Officer took the reins. We'll call her Becky. Becky directed AI's powers of pattern detection to super use, detecting scams and cons that once evaded human notice. Why It Matters: Fictional for now, these breakthroughs aren't isolated—they're part of a sweeping White House directive. Every federal agency must now have a Chief AI Officer. Meant to modernize government operations and cut red tape, it reminds me of another story I published this week on how the corporate sector is also using AI to go on the compliance offensive: Overwhelmed By Compliance? AI Could Save Your Business. Now that government is busy unlocking the kind of efficiency private industry is also tackling, it's important to ask the question: how long until the public starts to demand AI leaders over human politicians? That's not as farfetched as you might think. Last year Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie published Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, examining how AI will empowers humanity to address its monumental challenges in novel ways. The authors wonder when people will abdicate more authority to AI as it becomes increasingly intertwined in every aspect of life. 'Today's human leaders should prepare to be the first in a line of human sovereigns to face the struggle of locating a balance between leveraging the advantages—and, in some cases, the need—for AI in governance without going so far as to succumb to total dependency, instead finding the proper synthesis between the extremes of despotism and anarchy, merging the will of humans, the knowledge of machines, and the wisdom of history.' Caution is still needed. While AI's ability to fix government inefficiencies is impressive, we must be cautious not to over-rely on it. More, we need to ensure its ethical deployment. We don't want a situation where generations from now, citizens cannot recall a time where AI wasn't running everything. ***** That's it for this week. Tune in next for the latest developments. In the meantime, here's to making us all smarter in the Intelligence Age.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A New Way to Fix the Housing Crisis
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two decades ago, the fire marshal in Glendale, Arizona, was concerned that the elevators in a new stadium wouldn't be large enough to accommodate a 7-foot stretcher held flat. Tilting a stretcher to make it fit in the cab, the marshal worried, might jeopardize the treatment of a patient with a back injury. Maybe our elevators should be bigger, he thought. The marshal put this idea to the International Code Council, the organization that governs the construction of American buildings. After minor feedback and minimal research (the marshal measured three stretchers in the Phoenix area), the suggestion was incorporated into the ICC's model code. Based on one man's hunch, most of the country's new elevators grew by several square feet overnight. The medical benefits were not quantified, and the cost impact was reported as 'none.' It is one of the many small rules that have divorced our national building standards from the rest of the world. According to research by the building policy wonk Stephen Smith, who recounted this story in a report last year, changes like these are one reason it now costs three times as much to install an elevator in the U.S. than in Switzerland or South Korea. What does America need to get its building mojo back? Some look to the past, and observe that we once built towering monuments and vital infrastructure at lightning speed. Others look to the future, banking on revolutions in artificial intelligence and robotics, new materials and technologies, or modular construction techniques. Smith prefers to look around the present. The Center for Building in North America, which he founded in 2022, is translating global wisdom on the design of elevators, stairways, and other hidden innards of our buildings for a U.S. audience. The key word there is translating. Unlike in medicine or computer science, in which English is the language of expertise, information about building practices is hopelessly divided between countries. In construction, we are still standing around the unfinished Tower of Babel, unable to communicate knowledge about plumbing, HVAC, or window design. Smith has watched as other issues he has championed—restrictive zoning, parking minimums—took off. Now the former journalist, co-founder of New York City's pro-housing group Open NY, and onetime Twitter power user known as @MarketUrbanism is sizing up a larger and more complicated target for reform: building codes, the long, technical documents that govern how our apartments get put together. 'A zoning code is not fun to read, but a motivated amateur can figure it out,' he observed. 'But building codes and standards—unless it's your job, you will never get it.' So, two years ago, he made it his job. Smith, advised by a three-person board and funded by a grant from Open Philanthropy, now works under the Center for Building in North America. It is an effort to improve the way the country builds by dissecting what Smith estimates is over 100,000 pages of technical specifications, and determining which parts might be doing more harm than good. Pressure is mounting on U.S. building codes from all sides. Advocates for flagging downtowns would like to change the rules to make it easier to convert office buildings into apartments. California is grappling with how stringent codes might be impeding the recovery from the Los Angeles wildfires (and how lax rules might have caused the disaster in the first place). Conservatives are furious over energy-efficiency updates, and some red states have sued the federal government over their enforcement. Modular construction companies are grappling with the country's fragmented code landscape, in which rules can vary between states and cities. Everywhere, the crisis of housing affordability has built momentum to relax long-standing quality-of-life rules to permit cheaper apartments (think: windowless bedrooms, microunits). Rather than rising to the occasion, the solutions just keep getting weirder and worse. Into this contentious discussion steps Smith, with a different idea: What if we could change our ways and build things better, without any sacrifice at all? Late one winter afternoon, I went for a walk with Smith in his East Williamsburg neighborhood. It's a hip part of Brooklyn, where the centuries-old clapboard houses are interspersed with glassy boxes of recent vintage. A good place, in other words, to scrutinize the types of structures that have characterized the recent big-city building boom. Smith noticed a woman with a dog leaving the lobby of her apartment building. He said: 'Excuse me, does this building have an elevator?' She replied: 'Yes—are you looking at moving in?' 'Uh, yeah,' he stammered. He wasn't, but saying yes was simpler than explaining the truth: Smith had recently published a 122-page report about the country's failure to build good elevators. That research, a summary of which appeared in the New York Times in July, concluded that Americans, despite having invented the elevator and the skyscraper, have forfeited our mastery of this most fundamental urban transportation device. A combination of codes, standards, and labor practices has left the United States suffering from a national shortage of elevators compared with our peers, Smith found. As a result, much of our new, mid-rise infill housing of three, four, and even five stories is off limits to those who cannot use the stairs. The research was inspired by Smith's own long illness, which left him struggling to climb the stairs to his apartment. 'While many of us may be stair users for the moment,' he wrote, 'we're all born disabled and, with any luck, we will die disabled as well.' That report builds off another Smith hobbyhorse: What we lack in elevators, we more than make up for in staircases. Four years ago, the Seattle architect Michael Eliason began drawing attention to the fact that American building codes are unusual in their requirement that even short, small apartment buildings contain two staircases. This fire-safety mandate produces apartment complexes with long central hallways (think: the Overlook Hotel) and apartments with windows on only one side. In his book Building for People, Eliason shows how this rule makes apartment construction on small lots impossible or impossibly expensive, prohibiting many designs that flourish in places like Germany. Last year, inspired by these observations, Smith and the California housing researcher Ed Mendoza published a thorough policy brief on single-stair buildings in Cityscape, the journal of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Through the Center for Building, Smith has helped jurisdictions that want to make changes and tracks those that have. 'It gives more gravitas than some architect loudmouth in Seattle,' said Eliason, who sits on the center's board. 'Stephen has created a centralized area for the effort, distributing knowledge, building relationships.' Jesse Salomon, a state senator in Washington state, was one of the first lawmakers to take up the cause. In 2023 the governor signed Salomon's bill directing the state's building codes commission to study single-stair reform. 'I hate when politicians say crisis, but we do have a housing-supply crisis, and allowing systems to work as they have in the past is not an option,' he told me. 'I think maybe they track towards overregulating in the name of safety. The lack of housing is also a safety problem.' The principal objection to higher structures with one stairway is fire safety. But according to new research by Smith and Alex Horowitz of Pew Charitable Trusts, there was no correlation between fire deaths and modern single-stair architecture over a 12-year period in New York City, the rare jurisdiction that permits six-story buildings with one stairway. 'There has been so much interest from policymakers,' said Horowitz, the director of Pew's Housing Policy Initiative. 'The one question holding back authorizing single-stair construction to help make a dent in the housing shortage has been questions about fire safety. That's why we wanted to do empirical work here, and we found that there's no trade-off with safety.' At least 11 states and three cities have passed single-stair legislation since the beginning of 2023, according to the Pew report, with many of them turning to the Center for Building for expertise and occasional testimony. The latest to take on the subject is Massachusetts, where, following an October report on single-stair reform, Gov. Maura Healey's Unlocking Housing Production Commission recommended the policy change for buildings up to six stories with as many as 24 units. Austin, Texas, is one city where the council has directed staff to study changes to the staircase code. 'The building code is the next frontier after the zoning code,' said Parker Welch, an advocate with the local pro-housing group AURA who used the center's work to advocate for the reform. 'All these systems work in conjunction with each other. It's this Gordian knot you're trying to untie.' In a sense, these activists are following a familiar urbanist playbook of the past two decades: Find the hidden rules, then rewrite them. After the parking scholar Donald Shoup put pressure on the Institute of Transportation Engineers for their prescriptive, suburban parking rules, the association's president stopped supporting mandatory parking minimums in 2019. YIMBY groups have dug into obscure zoning provisions. The National Association of City Transportation Officials, founded in 1996, has advocated for pedestrian-friendly changes in the codebook that governs American roadway design and recently got its own street design guides approved for use in federally funded projects. New York University's Transit Costs Project has dissected the differences between rail transit construction in the United States and abroad, spotlighting assumptions we should revisit. In Olympia, meanwhile, Salomon has moved a new bill through the state Senate inspired by Smith's research: update the state building code to permit elevators in small apartment buildings to comply with 'global safety standards'—giving flexibility to architects and opening the state's elevator market to popular, smaller international models. The first U.S. building codes emerged from a public-minded desire for health and safety and growing pressure from the insurance industry, which manifested in Progressive Era tenement laws and fire-prevention rules. It was a bottom-up process, messily divided between three distinct code-making organizations until the 1990s, when the International Code Council was created. In 2000 the organization established the International Building Code, which applies to buildings larger than single-family homes. Like the World Series, the IBC is largely an American institution, with updates to construction standards discussed among members at regular meetings, culminating in a new set of codes every three years. Those 'model' codes are then adopted by cities and states. Mike Eriksen, a professor of economics at Purdue, is one of the few academics studying how the requirements affect construction and design. It's to be expected, he cautioned, that industry groups would complain about the rules that dictate their practices. In 2022, for example, the National Multifamily Housing Council reported that adapting to code changes was the single greatest driver of increased development costs, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total cost of a building. But up-front costs are only part of the affordability puzzle: the Biden administration urged jurisdictions to modernize codes on the grounds that smarter choices during construction would save people money in energy bills and after disasters. At the same time, Eriksen says, the IBC process typically displays a 'general lack of evidence-based research on the costs and benefits of proposed revisions.' Eriksen notes that there are unacknowledged trade-offs in many of these new code provisions. A change in the 2021 International Fire Code, for example, required that midsize construction sites employ a 'fire watch' during nonworking hours. Nobody wants to see a construction site catch fire, but how often does that happen? Enough to justify a fire watch? How many fires does the fire watch prevent? A night watchman alone would not make or break a new development, but this is one of many such provisions, often motivated by fire safety, that stack up in the code every three years. In the Pew study, Smith and Horowitz point out that some fire-safety rules might even be counterproductive, to the extent they delay new construction. 'Requirements that discourage new building may have a paradoxical effect on fire safety, as people instead continue to live in older buildings that are more vulnerable to fire risk, because they were usually built without modern fire-rated materials, compartmentation, and active fire protection features,' the report concludes. The ICC, for its part, argues that its system is designed for advocates to make their voices heard on these issues. 'The open and transparent governmental consensus process convened by the Code Council allows for any interested party to help shape the next edition of the I-Codes,' Russ Manning, the ICC's senior vice president of technical services, said in a statement. 'Stakeholders from across the built environment participate by attending code hearings, serving on special committees, and submitting public comments and code change proposals.' Still, some code reformers I spoke to believe that U.S. building regulations ought to be (under a different administration, surely) the responsibility of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the only entity with the authority and expertise to match other countries' federal guidance on construction and impartially weigh trade-offs between safety and affordability. There is precedent for this: Since 1976, the 'HUD code' has been the guiding document for manufactured housing, or mobile homes. 'I want us to have a building code that's motivated by science and informed by trade-offs,' Eriksen said. 'I'm worried we're building a world that's too expensive to live in.' Not long after we concluded our tour of Brooklyn's newest residential architecture, Smith sent me an impossibly esoteric item from Washington: State legislators had drafted an ordinance to prohibit local governments from requiring or prohibiting exterior cladding, such as boards or shingles, beyond what is specified in existing building codes. This seemed to be an explicit response to an idea buried deep in a draft of a Seattle zoning revision that would have required cladding to be half an inch thick, thereby quietly banning the cheap, popular siding known as Hardie boards, which are 5/16 of an inch thick. The state's preemption would preserve the use of a popular facade material and maintain flexibility for builders in Seattle. 'As you get into the more arcane issues, I don't know if this can scale,' Smith said of his work with the Center for Building. 'It becomes a game of whack-a-mole.' That's because the ICC merely drafts model codes. States and cities adopt and modify the documents, creating a patchwork of rules with subtle variations from place to place, all the way down to the thickness of the boards. California and Alabama have adopted the 2021 International Building Code; Texas and Indiana are still using the 2012 version. Chicago has different rules from its suburbs, which have different rules from northwest Indiana. It's a challenging environment for developers of modular housing, in which factory-built components are assembled on-site. On the one hand, this creates an opportunity for reform: The pressure of so many cities and states drafting their own single-stair requirements, subverting the International Building Code's expertise, has helped Smith make the case for a change in the new IBC that would allow most four-story buildings to have just one staircase anywhere in America that uses the model code. If all goes well, your state may soon permit this more flexible style of missing-middle housing as a default. In a sense, that's the beauty of the ICC process: Just as a fire marshal in Glendale can single-handedly change the size of American elevators, a researcher in Brooklyn might be about to change the rules of small-building design. On the other hand, one reason for that building-code patchwork is a growing backlash, which threatens reformers' inside-game approach. Some of this is rooted in GOP opposition to conservation measures, but blue states are not immune from getting fed up with new requirements. In California, for example, a new bill in the statehouse would pause nonessential changes to the building code for the next six years. Its author, state Sen. Nick Schultz, said this would allow homeowners recovering from the L.A. fires to 'accurately estimate the cost of the work, and ease some pricing pressure on the homebuilding industry.' If that happens, it would also delay the arrival of small, single-stair missing-middle housing in California for a decade. 'What we're proposing are cost-saving measures,' said Mendoza, who co-wrote the HUD policy brief on single-stair housing. 'And those could get thrown out.' Right before an opportunity to rebuild two enormous neighborhoods in Los Angeles from scratch.
