Toured the nearby slum today with one of the guys from Wahoe Commune. Very deliberately did not take my camera. Very deliberately did not get a photo of myself being taken on a tour of a slum.

Couple dogs didn't like the look of me, people were ok. It's certainly what you'd call a slum, and there's plenty there in terms of basic human need to work with and for, but I've seen significantly worse in outback Australia.

Seems water is a bit of an issue, not the lack since the city started trucking it in once or twice a week, so much as the presence in terms of undrained puddles and mosquito infested ponds in the wet season especially.
Power is managed through the kind of jungle-vines approach to electrical cabling you'd expect.
Toilets are probably the main thing in that there kind of aren't any, and anything there would be would have to be waterless.and sewerless. Composting toilet technology has come a long way, can likely sort something out.
Houses have decent thermal mass but do get hot in summer and cold in winter, but without point of reference no one seems to mind. The new prefabs they're putting up on the outskirts and trying to move everyone into are apparently pretty terrible, being just plastic and tin.

No wind, lots of sun.

So the plan at this stage is to spam every student and/or engineer group  in the region in the hope of getting a handful of people wanting to pitch in on making and doing, and then get something similar from people in the slum so they can tell us what they actually want and be part of the making. This is for reasons of them being able to maintain and improve what gets made, test it all, work out the bugs, and then if they want start producing and potentially selling stuff to the rest of the area.
Wahoe connections assure me the latter group will be no problem to gather, so am now sending emails and being on the lookout for some engineeringy studenty types.