Retail. Luxurious. ‘Micro-lofts’ are luxury shantytowns for hipsters. Vancouver has come up with a unique solution to the outrageous cost of housing in the city: Murphy everything. A local construction company is building a block of tiny apartments, each the size of a one-car garage, and making them livable by turning their walls into the domestic equivalents of pop-up books.
The “micro-lofts” are located in the century-old Burns Block building in Vancouver’s Gastown neighborhood, and they can be had for $850 a month, a price I would have killed for when I was living in one of the many neighborhoods in New York that included the word “murder” or “die” in their informal nicknames and/or slogans. Livability can be squeezed into such a tiny space by re-purposing it for all the functions of life. Affordable Health Care in Thailand and Costa Rica. This year, a few hundred thousand intrepid American travellers will head to places like Thailand and Costa Rica, in search of something that they can’t find in the United States.
They won’t be looking for Mayan ruins or ancient Buddhist temples, but something a bit more practical: affordable medical care. These medical tourists will be getting root canals, knee surgeries, and hip replacements at foreign hospitals. If health-care costs in the U.S. keep rising—and especially if Obamacare is overturned by the Supreme Court—more of us may soon be joining them. For decades, wealthy people from developing countries have come here for care, but these days medical tourists travel all over the world.