Archinect - News

Friends of +POOL responds to inventor Dong-Ping Wong’s ‘bittersweet’ thoughts on the project

2024-01-25T14:22:00-05:00

'Friends of +POOL' have issued Archinect with a response to our recent reporting of concerns raised by Dong-Ping Wong, the project’s inventor and architect.

Reacting to news that the long-planned project had received $16 million in city and state funding, Wong described the step as “bittersweet” in a post shared on Instagram before expressing various concerns about the scheme.

“+ POOL's record on swim education and swim accessibility for communities of color speaks for itself,” Friends of +POOL Managing Director Kara Meyer said in a statement provided to Archinect. “Friends of + POOL has made DEI a major priority in its policies and programs, which is why it was a centerpiece of both the Governor and the Mayor’s announcements at the Jan 5 press conference.”

Responding to Dong-Ping Wong's criticism of “the long-standing lack of diversity of the + POOL board,” Gabriel Einsohn, PR Advisor to Friends of +POOL, commented that “four of nine board members are women and people of color.” Wh...

New York +POOL creator Dong-Ping Wong says new funding is ‘bittersweet,’ voicing concerns over gentrification and accessibility

2024-01-15T11:36:00-05:00

The long-planned +POOL in New York City has moved a step closer to realization, with Governor Kathy Hochul’s office announcing the allocation of $16 million for the project. Originally conceived in 2010, the scheme is designed as a self-filtering, plus sign-shaped pool in New York's rivers.

Reacting to news of the funding, project inventor and designer Dong-Ping Wong commended the city and state’s commitment to the project, along with the “tireless work of the organization and collaborators after years of pushing.” However, the architect also described the news as “bittersweet,” and expressed concerns that the project may have departed from the ethos that conceived it.

“When I started + POOL the goal wasn't to just build a pool,” Wong explained in a statement on Instagram. “The goal was to see if it was possible to make big civic changes to the city from the ground up for places that often get overlooked. When we decided to start a nonprofit in 2015, it was based on the ideal that a...

LA ART releases draft environmental report for proposed Dodger Stadium gondola

2022-10-20T12:45:00-04:00

According to the environmental study, maximum capacity on the gondola system would be 5,000 passengers per hour, with an estimated end-to-end trip of seven minutes. Admission to the system is intended to be free with a ticket to a Dodger game, and rides would otherwise be set at the same price as a Metro fare.

The 1.2-mile-long system will be supported by three 195-foot towers and include stops at the stadium, Chinatown, and its origin point in Union Station. The three proposed stations will vary between 74 and 98 feet in height and between 174 and 200 feet in length. Johnson Fain is reportedly one of the local companies that will be affected by the demolition project required to enable the system’s junction structure at 1201 N. Broadway. Construction is expected to begin as soon as 2024, with a 2026 debut likely to coincide with that year's opening day.

Many residents are still active in their vocal opposition to the $125 million project. The full Environmental Impact Report can be accessed here.

Opponents of Dodger Stadium's gondola project see it as a tool of gentrification, allege inside pitch

2022-03-25T08:30:00-04:00

“It’s just another way that we can’t own our neighborhood and feel safe and quiet here because literally you have something flying over your house all day long, forever, I guess.” said Tany Ling, a singer who offers private lessons at the home she and her sister bought in 2012. McCourt entities are buying up properties in the neighborhood, but the Lings don’t want to move. They started StoptheGondola.org to fight the project.

Frank McCourt, who owned the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2004 to 2011, began proposing the $125 million project back in 2018. The initiative has come up against stiff resistance, especially from those associated with the Los Angeles National Historic Park, which abuts Chinatown.

Previously on Archinect: Plans announced for a gondola to connect LA's Dodger Stadium with Union Station

Their side got help recently from a nonprofit called The California Endowment after it filed a writ of mandate in county superior court this week alleging that the Metropolitan Transit Authority chief Phil Washington had cut a sweetheart deal with McCourt’s LA ART company while acting as a lone intermediary. McCourt has maintained from the get-go that its plan is meant to reduce the legendary traffic caused by Dodger home games, but opponents say the overall effect will only wind up crippling the neighborhood while “[reaping] profit through the occupation on public land.”

Previously on Archinect: LA's propos...

The Frank Gehry-designed YOLA Center is a key cog in the transformation of LA's Inglewood suburb

2021-12-27T15:09:00-05:00

It is one of the most vivid examples of efforts by major arts organizations across the country to bring youth education programs out into communities, rather than concentrating them in city centers or urban arts districts. For Inglewood, the new YOLA Center is a notable addition to what has been a transformative wave of stadium and arena construction, which has spurred a wave of commercial and housing development.

The Beckmen YOLA Center opened in October on the site of a former Burger King restaurant as the latest iteration of a wave of high-profile projects tied to a larger plan being pursued by Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr. which are reshaping the community of 109,000 in spite of advocates’ criticism that similar developments are fueling a wave of gentrification.

Previously on Archinect: 'LET IT RIP!': Photos of Frank Gehry’s new LA Phil Youth Orchestra Center opening ceremony. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com © LA Phil

For his part, Butts Jr. says the satellite venue, which is as much the vision of Gehry as it is of LA Philharmonic director Gustavo Dudamel, provides a balance in an area known to outsiders for its sports stadiums and past economic woes.

“We’ve never been known for cultural enrichment,” he told The New York Times. “That is why this is so important to us. What’s happening now is a rounding out of society and culture: we will no longer be known for just sports and ente...

'Gentrification gray' is the latest design trend sweeping San Francisco's once colorful rowhouses

2021-11-30T17:20:00-05:00

More and more, amid the pastels and the gold-leaf embellishments, you see a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a cold war-era nuclear warhead or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like the Mission and the Haight, this phenomenon reads to some residents as an erasure of the Latino community or of the lingering counterculture.

Gentrification has authored a wholesale change to the city brought on by what New York’s outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio once referred to as a “crisis of desirability.”

Like the Big Apple, many highly-paid workers have begun returning to their former spendy enclaves, bucking a trend that had initially appeared to shrink the city’s tech population significantly as a result of the pandemic and leading to even further recalcitrance on the part of locals.

“I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere. I got my roots,” one lifelong resident told The Guardian. “Working with children, teaching kids music without asking for any money. It’s about me giving back to the community. Latin rock music was created here in the Mission district, so it’s about me keeping that alive.”

Controversial San Jose Flea Market redevelopment gets approval from city council

2021-07-08T19:27:00-04:00

The council’s decision comes after months of significant organizing and protesting, including a two-day hunger strike last week, by vendors who felt that they were shut out of negotiations. It also follows months of mediating between the vendors and the Bumb family by councilmember David Cohen, who represents the district where the market is located.

A large multi-use development project has been proposed for the site, which is adjacent to a BART station, since at least 2007. The site currently hosts a flea market that caters to primarily Spanish-speaking lower-income residents.

Recent protests have combined public outcry to draw some concessions. The Bumb family, which owns the property, will pay $5 million to the vendors as part of an assistance package that will allow them to stay until construction begins.

The Mercury News has more on the story here.

Opportunity Zones program is under fire

2020-07-28T14:15:00-04:00

Lawmakers created the program in an effort to help low-income communities, and the provisions in the 2017 tax law on opportunity zones were based on bipartisan legislation. But Democrats have become increasingly critical of the program in recent months, following news reports about how wealthy people are benefiting from the program.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are hoping to repeal the controversial Opportunity Zones program that brings certain tax breaks to investments in new development projects that are located in designated economically-distressed areas, The Hill reports. Though passed with bipartisan support in 2017, the program has faced criticism in recent months as some of the projects funded by these investments, including luxury apartment towers, have come to light.

The Architecture of Texan Gentrifiers

2020-03-24T09:25:00-04:00

So, in East Austin, in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town and Third Ward and Montrose, in Dallas’ Bishop Arts and Oak Cliff, among other gentrifying and -fied neighborhoods, the architectural language (what architects call “vernacular”) has become inseparable from the vocabulary of policy, where other complicated words, like “displacement,” “segregation,” “inequity,” and “NIMBYism,” are warring furiously.

Allyn West penned a photo-essay looking at 'The Architecture of Gentrification' across Texas.

'Climate Gentrification' threatens communities in Miami's high-elevation neighborhoods

2019-12-03T19:38:00-05:00

Little Haiti’s elevation is 7 feet above sea level with pockets in the neighborhood that go as high as 14 feet above sea level. By comparison, Miami Beach is about 4 feet above sea level. A building boom is happening all over Miami, including in low-lying areas, but some experts say sea level rise is speeding up gentrification in high-elevation communities that historically have seen very little investment from the outside.

WLRN, in collaboration with WNYC's The Stakes podcast, covers the impact of the recent investment interest in Miami-Dade County’s historically black inland communities, such as Little Haiti, which are "naturally resilient" to sea-level rise due to their higher elevation.

California's housing goals pull further out of reach

2019-07-23T19:17:00-04:00

California communities are approving residential building permits at a slower rate than they did last year, a sign Gov. Gavin Newsom faces an even bigger hurdle to reach his housing goals than when he took office in January. In the first five months of 2019, cities and counties issued permits for an average of 111,000 residential building units per year, according to data released Friday by the California Department of Finance. That’s a decrease of 12.2 percent from the same period in 2018.

The news is mostly bad for California governor Gavin Newsom's plan to build 3.5 million new housing units by 2025, as high land costs, a labor shortage, the effects of President Trump's tax cuts, and virulent NIMBYism threaten to stamp out regulatory reforms enacted over recent years.

“These days you see most interest in the luxury apartments in places like downtown San Francisco, because otherwise the rents don’t pay for the high cost of construction,” Matt Schwartz, president and CEO of the California Housing Partnership, told The Sacramento Bee, adding, “Yes, rent has gone up, but construction costs have gone up two to three times as much.”

Buffalo’s population grows for the first time since 1950

2019-07-02T18:21:00-04:00

Mayor Byron Brown said there will be a significant change documented in the 2020 Census for Buffalo. "We believe that in the 2020 census will allow Buffalo to show its first population growth since the 1950 census,” he said.

After nearly 70 years of population declines, The City of Good Neighbors is growing once again.

According to Buffalo mayor Byron W. Brown, the city could register significant population growth after the 2020 Census, a product, in part, of the city's growing refugee and immigrant communities. According to Census counts, Buffalo's population registered at roughly 260,000 inhabitants in 2010; Updated estimates for the 2020 Census have not been announced.

At an event commemorating World Refugee day, Brown touted the city's population boost, saying, "Diversity is an engine of growth," adding, "It is the way our country has grown from the very beginning."

To help guide future growth, the city overhauled its zoning code in 2017, another first since the 1950s.

Rendering depicting OMA's proposed expansion of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Image courtesy of © OMA and Brick Visuals.

The new Unified Development Ordinance is billed as as a form-based "green code" that eliminates parking requir...

Is LA losing its cool?

2019-06-20T16:20:00-04:00

It’s because I love my Los Angeles full of texture and a little untamed that I worry in these days of rapid displacement and rampant development. One of the first things I noticed as the rents in my Hollywood neighborhood went up was that the fluttering silk flags and drawings on torn cardboard and other random street art projects that often would appear overnight suddenly became more and more rare.

How does a city maintain its identity under the pressures of global brands and developers hungry for real estate? Though Los Angeles is a city known for destroying its recent past for the elusive present, there are only so many buildings and details this city can turn over before it's a different place entirely.

The Burger That Ate LA (discontinued, currently a Starbucks)

Looking at the Los Angeles of previous decades, one can see a metropolis full of quirks: consider, for instance, the now-demolished Brown Derby, the now-renovated House of Davids and the The Burger That Ate LA, a restaurant modeled after an enormous hamburger and a shrunken LA City Hall (regularly featured on the show Melrose Place), which has been aptly repurposed into a Starbucks.

Entrance to Nick Metropolis Collectibles, a vintage store on 1st and La Brea.

As these establishments are refurbished, relocated or altogether destroyed, an element of the city's eclecticism shifts from present reality to distant memory....

Suburbanization is back at the worst possible time

2019-06-10T14:15:00-04:00

Author William H. Frey, senior fellow for the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brooking Institute, writes, "These trends are consistent with previous census releases for counties and metropolitan areas that point to a greater dispersion of the U.S. population as the economy and housing market pick back up, perhaps propelled by young adult millennials who may be finally departing dense urban cores as they make a delayed entrance into marriage and the housing market.

These slowdowns were especially pronounced in the biggest cities. Among the largest 22, all but two (Jacksonville, Fla. and Fort Worth, Texas) showed lower growth last year than in 2011-2012. Twelve of the cities displayed their lowest growth since 2010, including northern cities like New York City and Boston but also other pricey coastal cities like San Francisco and Sun Belt growth centers like Dallas."

Frey adds that as growth rates for larger cities have taken a dive, even booming mid-tier cities like San Antonio an...

The fate of Chinatowns: Can they survive displacement and gentrification?

2019-05-29T09:00:00-04:00

The specter of unwanted change has loomed over a quiet corner of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District for nearly the past four years. [...] Displacement is a genuine concern in Network cities, which, in addition to Seattle, include Boston, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Toronto.

Several city staples like Chinatowns are facing the effects of gentrification and urban displacement. "White populations in Chinatowns grew faster, for example, than the overall white populations in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, according to a study by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The study also found that, though Asian Americans remain the largest ethnic groups in those Chinatowns, they no longer represented a clear majority."

Pacific Herb & Grocery, Chinatown International District, Seattle. Image © Curtis Cronn

Demographic transformations are rapidly growing throughout these "Network cities," which result in areas like Chinatowns to be vulnerable to gentrification, luxury development, and displacement. Using the city of Seattle as an example, a city study revealed that in 2016 the Chinatown-International District plus Little Saigon to the east had experienced redevelopment in some way. Already surrounded by an influx of transit hubs and sports stadiu...

The ABC's of Gentrification

2019-05-07T19:19:00-04:00

When bad things happen, we look around for someone to blame. And when it comes to gentrification, which is loosely defined as somebody not like you moving into your neighborhood, there’s no shortage of things to blame.

Depending on where you live it isn't difficult to notice specific changes happening within your neighborhood. From trendy housing developments, boutique shops, and independent cafes gentrification affects more than a neighborhood's curb appeal. A buzzword many have become familiar with these shifts in housing and businesses have appeared as controversial hot topics in politics and urban planning. However, what exactly does gentrification mean? If gentrification is something seen by all, why is it that so few understand the variables and details that go into this process?

For residents who have lived in older neighborhoods gentrification is understood as sever change and displacement. With the urban landscape continually changing all over the globe major cities are becoming denser and denser by the minute. Residents are being pushed out and forced to adjust to changes they're expected to understand. Thanks to the City Observatory, a website providing a data-driven analysis of cities...

Reviving Main Street, but now it's highbrow

2019-02-21T13:38:00-05:00

Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations...have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic. The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history. The practice is rarely free of conflict, even when developers have the best intentions.

In Mountain Dale NY, Butch Resnick now owns most of the previously vacant buildings and has hired a "town curator". Jennifer Miller digs into this and other recent examples, including in Monson Maine, Wardensville, W.Va, Cerro Gordo CA, of combining artists, rural-small-town nostalgia and tastemaking to create the perfect blend of artisanal, hipster consumerism scaled down from the lifestyle center to the town.

A Conversation with Alex Baca on City Engagement

2018-11-26T19:14:00-05:00

On this episode of Archinect Sessions we're joined with Alex Baca, a Washington DC-based journalist focused on smart cities, planning, bike advocacy and urban mobility devices. Recent news, and related controversy, surrounding Amazon’s newly announced move into New York City and Washington DC is what initially motivated us to bring Alex onto this show.

Listen to episode 133 of Archinect Sessions, “A Conversation with Alex Baca on City Engagement”.

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Toronto residents use political art to push for “Gentrification Tax” to keep neighborhoods affordable

2018-08-22T15:42:00-04:00

The billboard suggested the rapid rise in home values between 2008 and 2017 necessitates a steep tax aimed at speculative flipping. The proposed tax would grab as much as 100 per cent of the profit from a home resale during the first year of ownership, then decline by increments of 10 per cent over 10 years. It would target non-resident and resident buyers alike, including primary residences [...] the goal is to keep Toronto’s popular neighbourhoods affordable for all income levels.

Activating vacant land: a conversation about Detroit's potential and challenges

2018-07-13T15:34:00-04:00

Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self.

Urban Omnibus presents an insightful conversation between Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit, and Marc Norman, founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Associate Professor of Practice at UMich's Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Discussed issues range from tactical preservation, vacant land as asset, smooth growth, gentrification, and preserving Black spaces:

Detroit still has capacity for a population of 1.8 million, and we’re at less than 700,000. So part of our challenge is, how to prevent buildings turning into blight, to the point of having to demolish them?

On the other hand, if it does make sense to tear some things down, what do we put in their place? The architect’s mindset is often that the only thing that can replace a structure is another structure. But in Detroit, that makes no sense financially; it makes no sense in terms of the population. So we have to turn to other disciplines for an answer.

That’s...

A closer look at gentrification in the Rust Belt

2017-12-26T18:50:00-05:00

Gentrification. It is a word that we hear with increasing frequency in contemporary discussions about American cities. But what does that word really mean? And, even more importantly, what does it mean in the context of the region that I live in and love – the Rust Belt? [...] It is important to be clear about the meaning of this increasingly ambiguous term, because what needs to happen in the vast majority of urban neighborhoods in the legacy cities of the Rust Belt is far less ambiguous.

"Many critics of Rust Belt gentrification are holding cities to an unreasonable standard, and placing them in an impossible situation. If much of the city remains poor and run-down, this is proof that the city does not care, and is not trying hard enough. If, on the other hand, parts of the city begin to attract new residents and investment, this is proof that the city does not care, and is not trying hard enough. Heads I win. Tails you lose."

City Observatory published a commentary piece by Jason Segedy, Director of Planning and Urban Development for the City of Akron, Ohio.

Richard Florida on the fragility of the Urban Revival

2017-09-06T15:26:00-04:00

For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out.

Richard Florida paints a gloomy picture of the state of the great American urban revival in his NYT op-ed, "The Urban Revival Is Over," citing gentrification, income disparity, rising crime numbers, unaffordable housing prices, and the anti-urban agenda of the current White House tenants.

Joe Cortright, over at City Observatory, offers a good analysis of Florida's piece; breaking down numbers, highlighting statistics, weighing in on the crime numbers claim, and easing the general dystopian mood: "Rather than proclaiming the end of the urban revival, Florida’s evidence really makes the case for a renewed national commitment to building more great urban neighborhoods."

Building a gentrification early warning system with big data

2017-08-30T19:05:00-04:00

But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin? [...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.

In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high resolution — and what significant perils come with it.

New York's lost soul as catalogued by Jeremiah Moss

2017-08-28T13:50:00-04:00

If New York City has 8 million stories, than at least 4,650 are referenced in the book, which will serve as an invaluable resource to future scholars of the city. As its narrative moves north through Manhattan, visiting neighborhoods that have been gutted in recent decades—the Bowery, the Meatpacking District, Times Square, Harlem—it is interspersed with deeper considerations of how we got here as a society.

Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul is a chronicle of New York City's hyper-gentrification of the past decade, which serves as a further development of the author's blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, that has extensively tracked the 'murdering' of the city's character through government policies and greed. Writing under the pseudonym of Jeremiah Moss, Griffith Hansbury—a psychoanalyst and social worker by day, and a poet and author by night, collected a 'body of evidence' of what has gone wrong with New York. Both personal and insightful, the book offers 27 chapters densely packed with detail—a thrilling mix of copious research and biting observations, featuring long lists of shuttered moms-and-pops and disappeared shopkeepers.

“I think too often people get stuck on the nostalgia of it,” says Moss. “They tell themselves these things which I think are memes, like ‘this is normal, New York is always changing, people have always complained about New York changing, goin...

'The New Urban Crisis' as Richard Florida's mea culpa

2017-08-21T14:45:00-04:00

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

Richard Frorida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes. Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. “Much more than a crisis of cities,” he writes, “the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time” — “a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”

The author offers both—specific solutions like more affordable housing, more investment in infrastructure, and higher pay for service jobs—and va...

Skaters in London are trying to restore the Southbank Centre, a popular skating site

2017-08-08T13:37:00-04:00

The point is, skaters made that area safe; in the old days it was cardboard city. That is what skating does: it fills the cracks in society left by capitalist development … that is where skating exists. It’s like a fungus, it’s like moss, it just grows in the corners where no one else wants to be.

Back in 2004, two-thirds of a popular skateboarding site at the Southbank Centre in London was destroyed. In 2014, the final third of the site was on its way to closure when the property management changed hands. Seeing the turnover as an opportunity, a campaign—Long Live Southbank—began that proposed the reconstruction of the original site in its entirety. The effort has largely been successful; the Southbank Centre has agreed and the plans have been approved by the city.

It may not be so surprising that the Centre might re-welcome skaters as the Guardian explains, "the idea that skateboarders are the “shock troops of gentrification” has been well documented." Skateboarders are often willing to congregate in areas that others do not want to and in this way, can act as a neighborhood watch that in time, allows others to feel safe in the space as well. Now, the only thing standing in the campaign's way is raising the funds necessary—around £790,000—for restoration.

...

"Humanitarian emergency": Michael Greenberg looks inside New York City’s housing crisis

2017-08-01T15:47:00-04:00

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is [...] a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes.

"What makes the crisis especially startling," author Michael Greenberg continues in his latest piece for The New York Review of Books, "is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration."

The High Line launches new network platform to help future parks avoid their mistakes

2017-06-21T15:24:00-04:00

Now, Hammond has embarked on a new project: the High Line Network, an organization, which just launched a brand new website. Its aim? To help cities working on their industrial adaptive reuse projects learn from the High Line’s stumbles–and from each other.

In many ways, the High Line has been an undeniable success. Phenomenally popular, it has become one of the leading attractions in New York and has brought about a massive wave of development to the area. The flip side of this however, if not yet obvious, is that the project has also been lodged with complaints of spurring gentrification in the surrounding neighborhoods and has become emblematic of the widening class divide existing in the city.

Many of those involved in its creation have begun to express some remorse over the unintended consequences that have come about from the adaptive reuse project. With new variations on the idea popping up, from Seoul's new Skygarden to MAD's repurposing of dilapidated rail yards in MIlan, Robert Hammond, one of the founders of Friends of the High Line, has embarked on a new project, the High Line Network. The goal of the organization is to create a platform for new infrastructural re-use projects to share information so that they can avoid so...

Two arrested in Oakland Ghost Ship case

2017-06-05T20:50:00-04:00

Leaseholder Derick Almena and tenant Max Harris each were charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the December fire at Oakland's Ghost Ship warehouse, said Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley.

Back in December, tragedy struck as a blaze broke out during a show at Oakland's Ghost Ship—a DIY-venue located in a two-story warehouse. One of the two exits had been blocked, leading to chaos as party-goers attempted to exit to safety. The incident lead to the devastating loss of 36 young men and woman.

The leaseholder, Derick Almena, and the tenant, Max Harris, received much criticism for the incident, having endangered both the concert-goers and those living in the warehouse by not ensuring the site was up to code. Assistant District Attorney Teresa Drenick said the two men "knowingly created a fire trap with inadequate means of escape. They then filled that area with human beings and are now facing the consequences of their action." The two were arrested earlier today and each faces up to 39 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

Back when the incident happened, it prompted discussions of the safety and vitality of DIY venues such as Ghost Ship, and focused attention on t...

Is YIMBYism the proper antidote to NIMBYism? or should we throw these terms out altogether?

2017-05-11T19:06:00-04:00

Trauss's followers live by the neoliberal belief that deregulation and building more housing, even if it's only affordable to the richest of the rich, will trickle down and eventually make housing affordable for all. Her vision is Reagonomics "dressed up in a progressive sheep's costume," according to Becker. But Trauss's "fresh approach" to the dilemma of exploding housing costs has got conservative libertarians and lefty media outlets alike foaming at the mouth for more.

San Francisco, and the surrounding Bay Area, has long been the example around which issues of gentrification are discussed and cited. While it is far from being the only city to deal with an influx of wealth and the subsequent displacement of local residents, its role as the center of the tech boom has given the area one of brightest spotlights in regards to these questions. In a recent article put out by Truth-Out, the authors discuss the rise of a new (according to the authors) approach to solving housing crises—YIMBYism. YIMBYism stands for Yes-In-My-Backyard and is meant to designate a positive stance on development. It is an approach, as characterized by the authors, as being along the lines of trickle-down economics—the idea being that building more housing, even if it's only affordable to higher-income earners, will eventually make housing more affordable for all.

The article focuses on the conservatives running this movement claiming that they have become the "Alt-Right" of ...