I did a thing (and you can too)

[Bob Schroeck]

Why not start your own residence building? We have nothing written about Arizona yet, despite there being residences in California and New Mexico. As long as you don't steal anyone else's fictional characters, you have an entire state to tell stories about... and you have a couple of places relatively nearby for your new building's residents to meet.

I'll add that April 2017 is a great time to have a new residence get established -- which happens because new displacees are inbound to that area. According to our project calendar (which unfortunately isn't in the public part of the wiki) there's only new one residence showing up between early March and late May. (Not "established" or "opened" -- like a few other places it's an entire building complex that gets displaced in its entirety.)

So the process of creating a new residence is pretty simple. You don't have to work it out in this order, but it does make it easier:

1. Figure out who's living there. Who are your displacees? For both meta and in-universe reasons, they'll probably come from one or more of your own fandoms. (But like Rob said, don't poach anyone already in the setting.) Sometimes it's fun to pick characters who'll have some serious fish-out-of-water issues. And don't forget that, like Epsilon, your opinions of your displacees as real people may change from your original opinions of them as characters in a favorite story.
   
2. Remember that your displacees arrive as groups bound by their common fate/destiny. That means their enemies, if any, should also show up -- although they won't arrive in the same place or time. Come to think of it, all the protagonists don't necessarily have to show up at the same time, either -- a good example would be the characters from RWBY, who have arrived in four groups at three different times (and I'm toying with a story idea that will bring in a fifth at yet another time and place).
   
3. Regarding those enemies, don't worry how they'll tie into the overall plot. We can work that out later.
   
4. Once you know who and how many your residents are, look for a real-world location that you can, um, repurpose for your residence. Almost every residence in the project is or was a real building circa 2016. (I can think of only three exceptions to that right now.)
   
5. Check out the residence pages on the wiki for some ideas for how you want to run your residence. Does it operate kind of like a boarding house, like Blossom Apartments, the Beach House or Gulfside Rest, where the residents basically have private rooms and eat communally, and the manager is actively caring for everyone? Or is it a big place like Douglass Gardens, where everyone basically has a complete apartment with their own kitchen and the managers just make sure everything's running on an even keel and no one's wanting for anything? Stories like Rob's and the Moving Days series will give you a good sense of the different management styles, too.
   
6. If your residence is home to more than one band of displacees, how/when do they arrive? At the moment we have only one residence where characters from multiple works all showed up at the same moment, and that was mainly for the dramatic irony as they were all time travelers. In general while the first batch shows up in time for the opening of the residence, it's usually good for story purposes to have other groups show up in waves every week or two until you have your core population in place.
   

That's all the initial advice I can think of right now. I'm sure if there's anything I've overlooked, someone will add it.