CULTURE

Kanye West Wants to Bring Affordable Housing to Calabasas, Kardashian HQ

He reportedly “believes [that the homes] will break the barriers that separate classes … namely, the rich, the middle class and the poor.”


2019 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival - Weekend 2 - Day 3
Rich Fury

Calabasas is famously an enclave solely for the rich and famous (the Kardashians and Kanye West, Drake, Bieber) or the rich and famous-adjacent (the Bling Ring). It’s fairly far from the actual city of Los Angeles, and its McMansions are typically quite large and very private. There are strip malls hiding expensive restaurants, an Erewhon, numerous pilates studios. The median value for a house in is just over $1 million, with homeowners earning a median income of $140,929 per year.

It’s not exactly the first place you’d think of to build affordable housing. But Kanye West wants to change that.

Photos obtained by TMZ show Buckminster Fuller-esque dome structures on a 300-acre piece of land that West purchased a few years ago. He reportedly “believes [that the homes] will break the barriers that separate classes … namely, the rich, the middle class and the poor.”

The homes have been under construction for weeks, but crews were previously operating in secret, with butcher paper covering the site. A source told TMZ that West and his team are studying dwellings “from every period of man’s existence on earth” and that “the proportions feel otherworldly.”

West initially unveiled renderings for “Star Wars-inspired” affordable housing after he launched the Yeezy Home architecture studio last year. And Forbes further reported on West’s plans in a cover story published earlier this month. The rapper/designer took writer Zack O’Malley Greenburg to a “a bungalow in the woods” where four members of his team were preparing a proposal to show potential investors in San Francisco. Greenburg described the prototypes as “a trio of structures that look like the skeletons of wooden spaceships.”

“He tells me they could be used as living spaces for the homeless, perhaps sunk into the ground with light filtering in through the top,” he wrote. “We stand there in silence for several minutes considering the structures before walking back down to his lurking Lamborghini and zooming off into the night.”

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Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Harry Eelman.

Photo by Harry Eelman.

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Harry Eelman

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes

Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Harry Eelman
Photo by Nolwen Cilfuentes
Photo by Harry Eelman
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