Kanye West plans underground 'Yeezy' homes for homeless

So hip-hop legend Kanye West fancies himself as an architect, now that he has completed the US$20 million redesign of the ritzy Hidden Hills mansion he shares with wife Kim Kardashian West (where guests are asked to wrap their shoes in cloth booties in case they scuff the imported flooring).

Now that he has also mastered the design of sneakers, clothing, and packaging, the man who is talking about launching a huge real estate company says he has ideas for housing the homeless.

And this is how he would like to house the homeless: he wants to bury them underground. That’s right. Kanye West wants to build prefabricated, affordable Yeezy homes (like the sneaker, not), but these are no ordinary houses.

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West told a Fortune reporter these homes would be inspired by Star Wars movies (in turn inspired by Tunisian homes) and could be used for underground homeless housing.

The Yeezy homes would have the austerity of those earthen mounds on the Star Wars planet Tatooine, which was Luke Skywalker’s childhood home. But they could be “oblong and dozens of feet tall”, and sunk into the ground, with some light filtering in through the top.

This beggars belief. Why on earth would a homeless person want to live underground in a high building with no windows that sounds suspiciously like a prison?

To his credit, West acknowledges there is a homeless problem and would like to do something altruistic. That’s a great start. He says he will be looking for more architects and designers, but clearly, they will be hired to work on his ideas, not to present new ones.

Because there can be no serious architect who thinks this is a good idea. The homeless need light and airy homes, and windows with pleasant outlooks, and they need to live in close proximity to a wide variety of services, just like the rest of us.

They do not need to be buried away underground, and out of sight. Is that what this is about? Getting rid of an eyesore?

It’s staggering how an enormously rich person can just open his wallet and get whatever he wants – be it a Lamborghini SUV or a bunch of designers pouring over their computers to model a Yeezy home for a homeless person.

Kanye West should stick to his music where his not inconsiderable talents lie, and leave the architects to do the job they are good at.

And maybe the superstar who named his sixth album Yeezus, could start by inviting the homeless into his own mega mansion. Perhaps they could even leave their shoes on. And just maybe West could start listening to what they have to say.

And just maybe after that he can sit and listen to the architects.

• This article originally appeared on stuff.co.nz