She Grew Up Homeless in Lykins. Now She's Building Homes There

Rosana grew up in Kansas City's Lykins neighborhood, where she experienced housing insecurity as a single mother working double shifts to keep her kids afloat. Today, she's going back to that same neighborhood, this time to build on it. Through her nonprofit Embrace Your Shine and its development arm, Micro Living Midwest, she's converting shipping containers into affordable housing for young adults, those couch-surfing, living in cars, or in storage units while working or in school facing "hidden homelessness". In this conversation, she opens up about blowing up her finances as a day trader, the accidental path into real estate development, securing project-based vouchers with the Housing Authority of Kansas City, and why she's building toward 500 homes in the next decade. It's a conversation about lived experience becoming infrastructure and what it takes to convince a system built for scale to make room for community.