All right, would you like to see my home? I know you would. That's why you're here. I'm gonna turn the camera around and then I'm gonna take you around my house. Now keep in mind, here's the idea. I'm not suggesting that the things you see in my home would make sense in an inner city. My house was not built for that. But it will stimulate some ideas, and let's look at that.

All right, let's start with this lamp. This lamp seems kinda random and not important, but it is, because with the addition of that little bit of accent light, which you can't see too clearly here, it completely opens up this part of the room. The point of that is that if you spend just a little bit on lighting it completely changes how people perceive the livability, and it costs almost nothing to put in a little bit extra of accent light.

Next point is the view. I did not optimize my house for the view, so you have to kind of get up to the windows to look out. Now in a community you wouldn't have this kind of view of course, but you could easily organize it so that you're always looking at something interesting, whether you're looking at your window at the park or you're looking at interesting architecture across the way. People's lives completely change if you get that right.

Here's my workspace. This is where I do all of my Periscopes from. Typically I'm in that chair and the iPad I hold it in my hand would be right in front of that chair. Here's where I do all my work. This is a Wacom Cintiq. It's a computer screen that is a drawing pad at the same time, so I draw directly on the computer monitor. And here's a Dilbert that you won't see for a month or two in the papers. One of the things I do is that I hate desks that face the wall because you feel claustrophobic. So I put my desk area so that it's facing out to the room and the view.

All right, I'm gonna take you down the hall. Oh here's a big old TV, and I'm going to make a point about how that might not be useful to have any kind of TV screen in modern homes. Here are some books I'm reading. You don't care about that. There's some Dilbert awards I've won and some Dilbert dolls.

All right, I'm not gonna show you the bedrooms. They're not very interesting. But look down here. Here's a piano. You would not have these in inner-city homes, but I can't imagine that you wouldn't have some homes that are optimized for different lifestyles. You might have a soundproof room for people who are musicians. That might actually be your job. Maybe you're a professional musician. They need a room to practice or to do gigs in. So I've got a little backlighting there just to show you how a little bit of light completely changes what you got going on.

All right, take you this way. Here's a room that's sort of a playroom. Again this doesn't apply directly to anything in the blighted areas. Here's a drum set and a little portable piano. Christina uses the piano and I'm trying to learn the drums. Now here's what's interesting. Notice that I've set the drums up across from the TV. I actually take drum lessons online with a live person, and I was doing this as sort of a test to see how useful it is to try to take a class where the video screen, instead of a live person, it's a live person. He just happens to be on video. I just send my phone. He just calls in on FaceTime. I send my phone over to the screen and I'm talking to him live. He shows me how to play and it works pretty well. So that might be a model of education in the future that you just need a quiet room.

I'll take you into this room, and some of you already know I'm obsessed with laundry rooms, and it's because laundry rooms are rarely set up to be optimized. There are a million things you need to do. For example, notice that I've got a little garbage there and then some fabric softeners above the dryer. You always have to throw away the little lint and various things when you're doing laundry, and if you don't have a garbage right there it's ineffective. So this is poor design on my part because I didn't put a place to easily put a garbage pail, but I need it all the time. You have to have the doors lined up so that one doesn't interfere with the other. You need lots of space.

And here's something that I like. This is a movable cart that I use for taking my laundry where I need it, picking up the laundry, you name it. Somebody just asked me do I have somebody doing my laundry. I do not.

Here's my cat box. I built a separate room just for the cat's bathroom, and I put in it of course a floor that's easy to clean. Maybe all your cat supplies are here and then a little area that the cat can go up and look at the window if she wants. But my life is so much better because my cat box is raised. I never have to bend down. Cat just jumps up here and jumps in there, and I made it super big so that I don't have to clean it as often. And then all my supplies are here and I just bag it and throw it in there temporarily. All right, so that's the cat room.

Come with me downstairs. I'll show you a few other things. All right, here's, whoops, something just happened on my screen that I can't get rid of. Okay, there we go. So here's my main living room. There is nothing to learn on this for blighted people except this one design element. You see that behind the couch there's a long table with some stools. This is a really good design, putting a table behind a couch, because it discourages people from eating on the couch because it's just as easy to sit on this little table if you're trying to watch TV. But I'm not sure a modern house needs a television.

Now let's look at the floors. My floors are porcelain. Porcelain is probably too expensive for inner-city homes, but there might be something that's the best design for a floor that has the qualities this has, which is you can't stain it, you can't break it, it's almost unbreakable, sustainable. You can just wash anything with a rag. And if you had a Roomba, one of those little vacuum vacuums that is like a robot, you can have your place clean with minimal effort if you build your house with a vacuum robot assumed as part of the design. You could just have a place for it to be out of the way until it does its thing.

This is what I call the crap island. So the door over there is the entrance from the garage. That's where I'm usually entering. And when I enter the house I almost always have stuff I need to put down. So I built this as the place you put stuff down. Now unfortunately it gets messy pretty easily, and especially when you've got electronics and you're plugging stuff in. This is kind of a mess. That's the mess. But I probably would have built this to have drawers for this stuff or maybe some kind of a lid or cover so that you've got stuff plugged in but you don't have to look at it unless you want to. So this could have been designed better.

I'm going to show you my kitchen. Again, very little of this will be applicable to the inner city, but it might give you some ideas. Notice that there's an eating area that's really just part of the kitchen. It's just built in. This is a really good design for a family. You would want this bigger, at least seating four or five, but it's an excellent design to have the island there. What I find is that in the modern world people rarely want to use the dining table. So I didn't want to have a separate room for a dining table. So I just floated it out in the main part of a central thoroughfare, and it'll probably just get rid of this because I've literally, I don't think in five years I've had a meal at that table. So I might just get rid of it. All right, so I would say in a low-cost home a dining room would be unnecessary.

And here I've got a few microwaves, and microwaves are problematic some say because they destroy the nutrients, but I don't know the science there. Here's a warming drawer. We've got all kinds of burners here and a griddle in the middle. So this middle thing heats up so it's like a griddle. Very handy. I've got a couple of dishwashers. You need that in the big house.

Now here's a feature called an appliance garage. When you open it up here your appliances, the messy stuff like carbs and just doesn't look good on the counters, you can shove it all in there and it stays plugged in. And when you want to use them you just drag them out and they're already plugged in. It's a very good feature.

Now I'm a big fan of not putting the oven and the cooktop facing the wall. It's much better if you're facing out. If there's a television in the mix that's even better.

Here's the back kitchen. Oh and here's something. This little closet right here is a little broom closet. These two little doors. And I once lived in a house that had no broom closet near the kitchen. I had to go three stories to get a broom. It was the worst design ever. You should of course make sure that you've got a place for your animals if you have pet food here. I built a little cart that I use to clean up the house if you've entertained, you need to go pick up a lot of dishes, etc.

I've got pullout drawers for recycling and garbage. Very handy. And they look good when they're closed.

All right, let me take you down this way. So I'm skipping the bedrooms. There's nothing interesting in there. So here was my biggest mistake when I built this home. It's a home theater and seats 10. If I were to build a house today I doubt I would include this. And here's the reason. In today's modern home and the way people live, almost nobody ever wants to watch the same show at the same time. We all just use our phones and our headphones and it's just better. So the home theater you don't need. And I would question in a low-income house if you even need a television of any kind if you have smartphones. So that would be a question I have.

Down here, sorry this is a little blurry, I've got a central wiring closet here. So you've got all kinds of stuff here. It's good home design to do a sort of a home run situation where all your wiring goes to a central place. Now here's the interesting thing. When you've got all this equipment in here this closet gets warm, so I actually have to cool it. But I always thought it would be better to see if you can recycle the heat from your electronics and make it part of the house heating.

This was a pool table that nobody plays on except the cat. That's a cat toy in the pool table. That's all I use it for.

And here's an example of how important it is to have the outdoors coming in. So the city here is the little sunspot that I sometimes sit in. Right here's a little home gym I have that I use when I'm not going to the gym. I prefer going to the gym just to get out of the house, but sometimes I don't have time so I might use this one.

Here's my backyard. There's nothing to learn here except that if you don't get enough vitamin D from the sun you have all kinds of problems: attitude problems and energy and health and whatever. So you should design a home so that people are encouraged to go outside for something, just to be outside to get that vitamin D. So it's not going to look like this in the inner city, but there should be someplace that's sort of right outside that could encourage you to go get some sun.

All right, Snickers wants to go out. Here's a sauna. You won't see that in the inner city. And then this room is the most surprising room. Well I'll just show it to you. So most inner city homes don't have an indoor tennis court. This is the reason I built my house. Tennis was my passion for most of my life, and so I built this here. I no longer play tennis because I don't like the repetitive motion. It's not good for me. But you can imagine something along these lines, not a tennis court but some kind of an indoor facility that people can rent and run around when the weather is bad.

All right, that's enough of that. And then here we've got a dog door that goes to an outdoor area that's a smallish area that just has artificial grass. So I don't have to let the dog out. She can just go out there and do her thing. It was real easy to clean up. Artificial grass is much easier to clean up the dog stuff from than it is from real grass.