City hires visionary architect who claims to use neuroscience for trauma recovery to end homelessness

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Visionary architect Ma Ry Kim

Source: KHON 2 news
Read time: 1.5 minutes, plus 51-second video
 
This Happened
In October 2024, Honolulu city government unveiled a plan to address homelessness with neuroscience-backed architecture.
 
Who Did This?
The architect hired to create the housing units is Ma Ry Kim. She is the CEO of B+HARI (Brain Health Applied Research Institute), which she co-founded in 2020 with a neurologist to design groundbreaking spaces that merge “cutting-edge neuroscience” and architecture to support cognitive resilience and brain health.
The city of Honolulu is spending $700,000 to renovate a warehouse, creating fourteen individual units of housing. The program is being operated by The Institute for Human Services, Inc., a non-profit in Hawai′i focused exclusively on ending homelessness. The state of Hawai′i will fund the operating costs, expected to cost between $1.5 and $2 million a year.
 
The Premise
Hailed as a “revolutionary city-state program” by the media, placement of homeless individuals in unique individual housing units will rewire their brains to help them heal. According to KHON 2 reporting, “Architect Ma Ry Kim designed the space using neuroscience research on how the brain heals from the trauma of homelessness.” The 51-second video below, by KHON 2, shows Kim explaining how it works.

​Analysis
There is no prior experience with this housing program that could provide evidence that this will work. The neuroscience behind the program was neither explained nor referenced. It is unclear what homeless individuals need to heal from but it has something to do with “trauma recovery.” It is unclear how healing from trauma will end their homelessness. It is unclear how living in units with four zones on a spectrum of public versus private space will rewire their brains.
 
Why Is This Happening?
This program is typical of the utopian Leftist project of the past one hundred years in America which believes that an administrative state can and should rule by science to eliminate all human suffering. Usually, the State makes a perfunctory attempt to provide the science background for its grandiose projects, but in this case, the manipulation of human plasticity, evidence from neuroscience, and rewiring brains were simply asserted.
 
This program is activism based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals which places care for the disadvantaged over all other moral concerns (such as tradition, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty). They assert that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences, such that individual differences in success or failure are caused by experiences, not unchanging personal traits caused by genetics. That is a false certainty that leads nowhere good, and is doomed to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on a plan that is guaranteed to fail.