Tony Hawk

My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me 😭

Man, I just love this idea. Especially if they added a grocery store and really encouraged mixed use shops rather than all the normal mall stuff. I love the community it naturally fosters and I would do a lot for convenience. There’s something that feels so cozy about not needing to leave the building in inclement weather to grab a bite or run a couple errands, or just being able to take a nice lit, climate-controlled walk at night.

A few thoughts on this piece in particular: (1) The rent better be crazy affordable if they can’t have stove tops. Everything else seems great, but a kitchen you can’t really cook in makes it borderline uninhabitable imo. At least have one of those communal kitchens like they have in dorms.

(2) They mentioned natural light being an issue and that only exterior shops were typically suitable for retrofitting but the unit we see in the video appears to only have a window out into the mall. It’s hard to truly tell, but with the large skylight in the mall area, it seemed like the interior shop windows for the units received decent natural lighting.

(3) No explanation for the teeny tiny unit size? Maybe that was just the size of the preexisting space delineations, but I see no reason other projects couldn’t combine 2 to make normal sized studios or even one bedroom units.

This is a complicated topic for me. I’m 35 so my experience is obviously different than today, but I self-harmed from age 12 into my 20s. Finding community and understanding in self-harm & mental illness-focused communities was transformative for me, especially in my younger teens. Many days/months/years this community felt like the only reason I was still hanging on.

Obviously I am not in favor of the “encouragement” of self-harm, but I also wonder how much nuance is applied when categorizing content as such. For example, is someone who posts about how badly they want to self-harm “encouraging” this? Or are they just seeking support? Idk. I have no answers. I just think about how even bleaker my teens would have felt had I not found my pockets of community on the early internet. On the other hand, sometimes I do wonder if we subconsciously egged each other on. Perhaps the trajectory of my mental health journey would have been different had I not found them. That’s not something I can ever be sure about, but I think given my home life and all the things I was going through already, if anything, my mental illness might have just manifested itself in a different way, like through substance abuse issues or an eating disorder or something. (And to be clear, I was hurting myself before I found the community, so it might have just been business as usual.) Like I said, I don’t have any answers, it just feels more nuanced to me, as someone who has lived some version of this.