In a city where change often involves immense sums of money, the financing for Mr. Ho’s project feels almost vaporous, like loose nutrients harvested out of the air.

Mr. Ho is living on his savings. Money to rent the storefront and build the transformer — $33,991 in total — was raised through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, with the biggest contributors paying $1,000 or $1,500 in exchange for small promotional displays.

Karen Wong, deputy director of the New Museum, which featured Mr. Ho at its Ideas City Festival this year, likened him to other young architects who were pursuing socially conscious goals, including the designers of the Plus Pool, which is supposed to someday float in the East River while filtering the water, and the Lowline, a proposed underground park below Delancey Street. “I see MiLES as really community activism 2.0, using a public and private equation,” Ms. Wong said.

As landlords hold out for tenants who can pay higher rents, Mr. Ho offered a way to serve both developers and the residents with whom they are often at odds, without bringing more bars into a neighborhood many consider already oversaturated, Ms. Wong said. “If they’re successful,” she said, “there’ll no longer be 200 vacant storefronts in the Lower East Side, which bring the neighborhood down. It’s not an endgame, but a chapter into, how do you remake a city from the bottom up?”

A week before opening day, Mr. Ho was swimming in stress. The company he’d hired to build the storefront transformer wouldn’t have it ready until Week 2. The original space’s landlord found a long-term tenant, forcing Mr. Ho to scramble for a new site, which he found in an architect’s office by the Williamsburg Bridge — a little small and away from the neighborhood’s foot traffic, but it would do, he said.

Then there were the organizations themselves. Many still hadn’t decided how they were going to use their time, and the architect was pressing Mr. Ho about potential disruption to his business. Week 7 belonged to Ghetto Gastro, a catering and events company run by Bronx chefs; were they planning to have late-night parties? Week 3 paired two potentially dissonant projects: Kollabora, an online community for knitters and other low-tech crafts, and the Makery, known for its high-tech workshops in electronics and 3-D printing; how would the two work together?