Learning a Different Model of Housing through Accessible Interactive Interfaces
The HABITABLE white paper (our founding document) lays out a serious hypothesis:
If we measure housing as human and community capacity can eviction prevention become more profitable than eviction itself?
The White paper relies on several robust and new concepts: Habitable Capacity Units (HCUs), A Social Repair Index, Workforce learning embedded directly into building housing, Equity earned through contribution, not capital alone. But here’s the problem we, and other foundations innovating new ways of living that aren’t backed up by policy or industry…yet… kept encountering:
How Can We Teach People About What We Want to Do?
Our explanation needed to be accessible, so we chose a Choose Your Own Adventure Game Interface.
When someone arrives at a housing system, they don’t arrive as a worker or renter. They arrive as humans under constraint.
They’re asking questions like:
Can I build something instead of just consuming it?
Is there a future here, or just a bed?
Will I have agency—or will I be managed?
Those are not just philosophical questions; they are decisions that affect the educational and economic realities of their lives.
So we designed the interface to mirror that reality.
The Pathways we built to showcase our outreach at the foundation included
“I need shelter NOW – I have nowhere else to go.”
“I’m a construction student looking to build equity.”
“I am a Researcher with an Intellectual Contribution.”
“I am an Artist with an Irregular Income.”
Each choice reveals just one way our or similar foundations can support turning the narraitve
Traditional housing systems only recognize homelessness; they do not recognize those workers who barely save enough, or who prefer to live out of their cars, then go into debt, or those students who dream of being able to own something one day. The game interface makes those invisible stages visible to other foundations, NGO’s, policy-makers, builders, etc. in a digestible format.
As you move through it, you start to see our model in the Olympic Peninsula (one of our Four Gateway Sites).
This prototype game is an explanatory model of the specific Olympic Peninsula path, but it is also a part of our broader Social Repair Toolkit, a set of tools, digital artifacts, curriculum, and practical information designed to help communities, organizations, partners, and residents understand complex systems without surrendering agency, and to help us flip the narrative.
Play our Choose Your Own Adventure at Olympic Peninsula Quiz Below
If you explore the interface, we’d love to know:
Where you felt clarity
Where you felt friction
Where you wanted more context—or less
What choice surprised you
Send this feedback to laurenm@500acre.org
