tech
When housing is unaffordable, this artist’s device makes pedaling harder
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TL;DR
- Artist Justin Blinder created a device called Ground Truth to illustrate the impact of soaring housing costs.
- The device attaches to a bike and increases pedaling resistance in neighborhoods where housing costs consume a larger portion of income.
- It uses data from the US government's American Community Survey's Rent Burden dataset, focusing on median rent share and the percentage of households spending over half their income on housing.
- The hardware includes a microcontroller, GPS module, servo motor, and SD card reader, operating offline without logging rider data.
- Blinder observed that areas with public housing showed easier pedaling, while luxury towers could complicate affordability metrics.