Kuce za zrtve Katrine,ideja iz filmova

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In the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the flooding of New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of survivors have been left homeless -- probably for many months. Large areas have been devastated, without any services. Readers wrote in suggesting that perhaps science fiction writers had some ideas that could be of practical use, given that these writers had imagined devastation on an even greater scale in many books and stories.

Easily errected temporary quarters should be first on the list.

Robert Heinlein, wrote about knockdown cabins before World War II, gave us the Quonset hut. Government procurers should be scouring military bases for similar items for rapid deployment in the affected states.

In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson writes about the U-Stor-It apartment:

Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20 by 30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units and ... a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays ... when the sun is setting over LAX.
(Read more about the U-Stor-It).

Storage places like these are always partially empty; perhaps the additional units could be rented for the next six months by the government.

In his 1998 novel Idoru, William Gibson wrote about the micro-bachelor:

He used most of his first month's salary to lease a micro-bachelor in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. The floor of his apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage.

There have been a lot of complaints about traffic in the newly crowded cities of Houston and Baton Rouge. Encourage car pooling, and then temporarily convert parking structures to housing -- killing two birds with one stone.

There is an interesting analog to the U-Stor-It "apartment" that is a real product -- the Quik House, a prefabricated kit house made from recycled shipping containers. The basic model has three bedrooms and two and one-half baths in 2,000 square feet.

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