Betterway

The proposal suggests a better way to live than our current single family homes and apartments.

Children usually have just two primary caregivers, sometimes just one.  The primary caregivers need to work and usually place the children with secondary, paid caregivers for a large part of their childhood.  Our old people are often warehoused where they are isolated from young people.  Teens are often turned lose upon the world with no place of safety.  Our individual houses or apartments, where we may not even know our neighbors, promote loneliness and waste.

I suggest a better way, a dwelling place where people live together, instead of separately.  In a Betterway, the school, the routine health care, the apartments, a cafeteria, open spaces, are all part of the same building.  The old look after the young, and the young bring joy to the old.  Education is something you share.

The solution proposed is one solution for many problems.  First, there is the problem of child care.  We allow our children to be left alone, or in the care of one person who may nor may not have the time or ability to provide the love and guidance children need.  Our teens are often at risk, forced to join gangs just to survive, feral children whose parents spend most of their time at work.  Our old people are put away in "homes" that are often dangerous and dehumanizing and almost always cut the elderly off from the young.  Our individual houses and apartments are inherently wasteful and leave many people lonely.  Communal living, where the old look after the young, where the teens have a safe, private place to live, and where adults, even married adults, have a room of their own which nobody can enter without their permission, solves many of these problems.

The population that can be impacted by communal living is primarily the big city and suburban population.  The Betterway would be a business, in the same way that an apartment house, a private school,  a restaurant, and a nursing home are businesses.  It would combine features of all of these.  People who lived in a Betterway would be expected to contribute some hours of work to the Betterway, teaching, cleaning, cooking, or gardening for example.  In this way the Betterway resembles a Montessori School.  The most important feature of a Betterway is a combination of community and privacy.  Children are never left alone with a single caregiver.  Teens always have a safe, private place of their own.  Adults also have a place that is theirs alone, while sharing a communal dining hall and recreational and educational opportunities.

While the primary population that benefits are individuals, who too often are lonely, or live in places that are unsafe, the world also benefits by reducing our current wasteful system of individual houses and apartments, individual heating and cooling, individual meal preparation, and expensive transportation between homes, eating places, and schools. 

The solution is to plan and build a communal living center called a Betterway.  This is not a commune, because it emphasizes freedom and privacy as well as fellowship and shared work.  It is urban or suburban, not rural. 

The Betterway has a large, open room where children live, play, and learn.  There are always a number of adults in the room, residents who sign up for monitoring, teaching, cleaning, and other chores.  Retired people are especially welcome in the children's room.  The setting is similar to a Montessori School, and replaces the public school where a large number of children are under the control of one adult.  Parents can be with their children any time they want, but when the parents are at work, they know some adult is always there for the children.

Betterway has a team of nurses on staff, and a doctor on call, who provide routine health care for all residents, especially for the elderly residents.

Teens graduate from the children's room and have a private room of their own, which opens only to their own voice, or in the rare instance of a call for help, to the voice of those in charge of preserving the safety of residents.  Teens can admit others or deny admittance to others.  A call for help brings a quick response. 

At age twenty, a teen becomes an adult, with full voting privileges in the Betterway, according to the Betterway's constitution.  A group of two or more adults may share a suite of rooms, but each adult always has a small private room of their own.  Adults are free to come and go.  Most work outside the Betterway.  Adults are required to put in a certain number of hours of community service to the Betterway. 

Retired adults, and the elderly, spend time with the children, in a large, open public classroom.  In rare cases, the elderly may be required to have supervision.

There is a communal dining hall.  Good cooks are especially welcome.  There is a communal secondary school which offers both job training and college preparation.  Classes are taught by residents as part of their community service, but there are also professional teachers.  Other features of the Betterway are a garden, sports teams, a library, shared computers, clubs, music and art rooms, and reading and discussion groups.

An investor could create a Betterway today.  The only thing new is the idea of a different and better way for people to live.  The closest thing we have in America today is the Montessori School, but that only addresses the needs of children, not of teens, adults, and the elderly. 

A Betterway building would be energy independent, using solar panels.  It would save the transportation costs to and from schools, and would provide a more active educational experience for children.  It would be near public transportation into a city, so the residents would not need private vehicles.  And it would keep people safe by making them part of a community.

Examples of how existing technology would be used in a Betterway include the voice recognition to allow or deny access to private rooms, the sound monitoring that recognizes a call for help, the educational toys and games for use the the children's room, the use of computers to guide self-education, and an understanding of healthy and sustainable food products for the communal kitchen.

The solution is a new way people may choose to live.  Today, communal living for all ages is an option that is unavailable to most people in America.  For it to succeed, the most important step is planing.  The name, Betterway, would need to be trademarked.  A board would need to be set up to insure the goals of communal safety and individual freedom were met in any facility that used the name.  Great care would need to be taken that a pilot model was a success.

Today this is just an idea.  I am looking for ways to work with others to make the idea a reality.

My goal for the next year is a feasibility study.  Could this work?  Could it be profitable?  To what extent do countries other than the United States already use this approach?  Within five years, I would hope to see the first Betterway in America open for business.

The biggest barriers would be laws such as zoning laws, permits, and other legal obstacles designed to only allow development that conforms to existing norms, the expectations that are common today in America, that every family has its own house or apartment, that most children go to a public school, that we have separate, and often widely separated, buildings for home, education, routine medical care, and elderly care. 

What I need most is others who know more about these barriers than I do, but share my belief that the way we currently live in America is often destructive both to the individual and to the environment.

My idea is just an idea.  I think it is a good one, and am looking for others who have the ability to turn the idea into a reality.

I am currently working alone.

What I have is an idea.  To make this idea a reality I need to be part of a team.  I am reaching out in the hope that other people share my vision of a better way to live.

I have no partners now.  I am posting here in hopes of finding some.

If, as I believe, many Americans are looking for a better way to live, then it should be profitable to provide living space, education, routine health care, food, and protection in a communal living center, instead of having separate apartment buildings, schools, doctors, restaurants, and "retirement communities". 

The Betterway should be funded by investment capital.

I am applying to Solve because I see a serious problem, involving both suffering and waste.  I think I see a solution to this problem.  This solution is far beyond my ability to bring about on my own.

I'm a mathematician by profession.  I need partners who know something about business and marketing.

One of the things I need to know is the kind of organizations that can pitch ideas effectively.

My basic idea for a Betterway does not require AI, but there are many ways AI could be used.  The Prize could be used to develop the AI.

A Betterway provides communal living for children, teens, and adults. 

One of the most important features of a Betterway is to provide a place for the elderly to live with plenty of young people around them.  With AI to monitor their mental and physical health, the elderly would have the freedom to be sociable, instead of being confined in a lonely room with a single (sometimes abusive or neglectful) nurse or caretaker.

For teens, privacy is very important.  Everyone in the Betterway over the age of 12 has a small, completely private room (something like a small hotel room in Amsterdam, with just a bed, desk, toilet, shower, and tv).  But there are occasions when a teen needs help.  AI could monitor the private rooms (without recording anything that goes on in them) and recognize a call for help.  AI could also tell whose room it is, and bar entrance by someone other than the room's occupant or an invited guest.

Children at the Betterway live, learn, and sleep in a large open room where there are always adults present.  AI could help organize that room, help teachers recognize when children want an adult, and when children want to be left alone.  AI could also spot instances of bullying, and notify a teacher to intervene. 

Yes, I think the Betterway idea, if it could be brought from idea to practical reality, would greatly increase urban health.  To mention just a few ways this would happen, think how much pollution comes from keeping empty houses and apartments heated or cooled.  The Betterway would use the system found in hotels everywhere except in America.  The power is turned off when the room is empty.  The toilets have a "small flush, large flush" feature.

By having housing, a school, and a walk-in clinic all in one building, many hours of driving can be eliminated, and health care except in emergencies can be provided, immediately and on site.

The Betterway would have easy access to public transportation, so that private vehicles would be unnecessary, cutting down on both pollution and traffic accidents.

The Betterway could provided medium priced housing for a large number of people in small but safe and comfortable rooms, thus allowing more people to live near the place where they work. 

The Prize would be used as seed money to begin the practical development of Betterways which, if successful, could spread to every city. 

Guns would not be allowed in Betterways.  People who want to own guns would be able to store those guns at whatever shooting range or hunting lodge they wished, but would not be allowed to bring any gun into any Betterway.

In a Betterway, every individual over the age of 12 has a small, efficient private room.  If two or more people choose to live together, they may, but their children stay in the common room, where they have care around the clock.  Mothers can breastfeed in the common room, of course, and parents (and grandparents) can visit the children at any time, but the mothers are freed from the need to constantly worry about their children (and the children are freed from being constantly worried about).  Also, teenage children have a room of their own.

Even if two or more adults choose to live together, each adult has a small private room where they can be alone if they wish, for whatever reason.  I suspect that would make for a better relationship, since people would be less likely to get on each other's nerves.  And every woman would have a safe place to go if she ever felt threatened for any reason.  The room's door would respond to her voice, and only to her voice, and "No." would always mean "No."

The Innospark Ventures Prize could be used to recruit venture capital to begin studies leading to the actual construction of a Betterway, a building where people live in small, efficient, moderately priced rooms, eat in a cafeteria, have their children cared for in a combination day care and school (where young children are never without adult supervision), and the elderly are allowed to live near their children and grandchildren without being a burden on them.

Clearly, even in the planning stage this is going to take a lot of money.  It is very important that the first Betterway to be built be successful, and so a great deal of research and development is necessary before the first brick is laid.  The Betterway needs to be designed from the ground up to be safe, comfortable, with the right combination of social opportunities and privacy, the right balance of safety and freedom. 

The grant could be used to write AI that would insure that balance between privacy and safety.  The AI would monitor all of the rooms, but would not record anything that goes on in the privacy of a room.  The AI would be able to recognize a medial emergency or a cry for help.  It could store data after stripping the data of any connection to any individual.

All real solutions to real problems are driven by data.

I am of the male persuasion, and would love to have women take an interest in the Betterway, since it can benefit them in ways only they are apt to notice.