Also announced this week were the three recipients of the 2013 AIA/HUD Secretary Awards, sponsored by the institute's Housing and Custom Residential Knowledge Community in conjunction with the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD). — bustler.net

Six residential projects have been selected as recipients of the 2013 AIA Housing Awards. The jury recognized projects in four award categories: One/Two Family Custom Housing, One/Two Family Production Housing (none selected this year), Multifamily Housing and Special Housing. — bustler.net

Housing starts in March rose to the highest level in five years. If developers keep building at that rate, there’d be one million new houses by the end of the year.

So, what are builders building and what kind of homes do consumers want? The granite countertop of the new kitchen is like the leather interior of a new car -- a standard, special order must-have. — marketplace.org

The winning entries of the 2013 Housing Tomorrow competition have just been announced, awarding three prizes and sixteen special mentions to design concepts that "explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy socially‐ and environmentally‐engaged approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects."

This year's first prize was presented to Die Hu, Boji Hu, and Yang Zhou for their extreme environments housing proposal, 'Life on the Ropeway.' — bustler.net

Four finalist entries have been unveiled in the Christchurch, New Zealand urban design competition, Breathe - The New Urban Village Project. The brief called for innovative medium-density housing development designs from collaborative groups containing a designer and a property developer. — bustler.net

Just a few months ago, we had published the winners of episodes #1 Shop and #2 Work of the international ideas competition series, POST+CAPITALIST CITY. Here are now the three winning proposals of the third installment, #3 Live. The brief invited architects to imagine how a post+capitalist society could affect our daily lives and the way we envision housing. — bustler.net

The Chinese Society for Community Organization produced the vertigo inducing series of photographs as part of a campaign to raise awareness for this type of living. It reminds us a lot of Skott Chandler’s House Watch series and Michael H. Rohde’s From Below, both giving us a unique perspective of the rooms we live in. The series also harkens back to the extremely cramped (and now demolished) Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong’s past. In some ways, things haven’t changed. — visualnews.com

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, together with city officials, announced today the winner of the adAPT NYC Competition, a pilot program to develop a new housing model for the city’s growing small-household population [...]. The winning entry, ‘My Micro NY,’ was designed by a development team comprising Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS. — bustler.net

Back in November 2008, we reported on Slovenian firm OFIS Arhitekti taking the first prize in the invited competition for a student apartment building in Paris' 19th district. The project has come together very nicely in the mean time, and we're excited to publish photos of the now completed Basket Apartments. — bustler.net

Czech architectural studio CHYBIK+KRISTOF ASSOCIATED ARCHITECTS has sent us images of the entry which won the team the Third Place in the international Green City Graz competition. Collaborating with Viennese office BKK-3, the architects participated in the architectural and urbanistic competition to project 700 apartments in the planned housing complex called Green City in Graz, Austria. — bustler.net

Three winning projects were announced in the Future Cities, Planning for the 90 per cent competition: ateliermob (Portugal), Municipal Housing Secretariat of São Paulo (Brazil), and Interazioni Urbane (Italy). The projects are part of the exhibition Future Cities: Planning for the 90 per cent in Venice during the 13th Architecture Biennale. Ten projects were selected for the exhibition from more than 100 participants from several countries. — bustler.net

American builders last month began construction on the highest number of new homes since October 2008, with housing starts jumping 6.9% in another encouraging sign for the housing market. — latimes.com

The Milllennials, the generation born from 1983 onwards, enjoyed a childhood free of bunkbeds or even shared bathrooms. Growing up in plush megahomes undoubtedly helped them become, in the words of one author, “self-centred, needy, and entitled with unrealistic work expectations.” Oddly, it also spawned a group of people patently unimpressed with backyards and breakfast nooks. — news.nationalpost.com

As Britain's housing shortage deepens, we asked top architects for their solutions to the affordable living dilemma — guardian.co.uk

"I think that [austerity] is used as a cliche because people don't have ideas, they want to crib [old ones] to do bad stuff," she said, in a Q and A session with Guardian deputy editor Kath Viner. "Schools, housing, hospitals – I think the government should invest in good housing." — guardian.co.uk