The Rise of Granny Flats | Artistic Pothole Shaming

Changing legislation has led to a building surge in granny flats across states pressed for housing.

For years, Steve Vallejos felt like he was shouting into a void. He owned a company that specialized in building small homes — accessory dwelling units, or ADUs — on people’s properties. He was convinced they offered a path to building affordable homes fast, yet red tape made the construction of such units painfully difficult for builders.

That dam opened in early 2017, when his state of California passed legislation that loosened rules to build ADUs — also cheekily called “granny flats,” “in-law units” or “casitas.” Today, Vallejos has built nearly 200 units in the Bay Area and runs a company that expects to assemble 1,400 prefabricated, off-site “kits” for ADU construction across Northern California next year. They’re a quick fix that Vallejos calls the “low-hanging fruit” of affordable housing policy. It’s one that’s now catching on across a country that faces an estimated shortfall of 7 million rental units for low-income renters, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Baadal Nanjundaswamy turned Bangalore’s roads into a lunar surface, but his day job is at the movies.

Four days before India’s moon mission Chandrayaan-2 was to land on the lunar surface, residents of the country’s IT capital Bangalore woke up to images and videos of an astronaut walking on craters. Their amazement turned into amusement as they realized street artist Baadal Nanjundaswamy was at it again.

The astronaut was, in fact, an actor in a spacesuit replica walking on one of the many crater-ridden roads of the city. This was yet another project of Nanjundaswamy’s where he makes use of art to highlight the city’s chronic problem of potholes. The visuals are realistic enough to seem beamed from space until an auto-rickshaw passes by and the camera pans away to reveal street lights, a footpath and a couple of men in shorts.

Amber Guyger was found guilty of the murder of Dallas resident Botham Jean. Would the verdict have been the same if she were a man?

Police violence has become a troublingly common narrative to the American public in recent years. On Tuesday, a Dallas jury flipped the usual ending.

Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, 31, was found guilty of murder in a case that’s captured the gaze of activists nationwide. While the rising debate around police shootings since Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, has centered on the safety of Black men in public, this one raised new questions about the safety of citizens in their own homes.

Guyger, who is White, was charged with killing Botham Shem Jean, who lived one floor above her unit in their apartment complex, while she was off-duty. Guyger has said she mistakenly thought she had entered her own apartment and believed she saw an intruder, shooting him in self-defense.