Archinect - News

Syracuse School of Architecture, SUNY-ESF researchers receive $100,000 grant to study the racial wealth gap in the United States

2023-07-27T15:13:00-04:00

A trio of researchers from the Syracuse University School of Architecture and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) have been awarded a new $100,000 competitive grant for their examination of root causes laden in the built environment that are underpinning the growing racial wealth gap in the United States.

Syracuse’s Associate Dean for Research, Eliana Abu-Hamdi, Associate Professor Iman Fayyad, and SUNY-ESF landscape architecture assistant professor Daniel Cronan were recently awarded the grant for their project “Closing the Racial Wealth Gap through Environmental Justice and Participatory Design.”

The funding was made possible through the Lender Center for Social Justice. Researchers say it will help them achieve their project’s aim of identifying a list of positive changes that can be enacted in the most heavily-impacted communities. The research is being conducted in three phases and will result in BIM-supported participatory planning that demonstra...

Los Angeles bets on tiny homes to battle enormous homelessness crisis

2020-12-14T14:15:00-05:00

At the city’s first tiny home village, scheduled to open in January, each of the 39 closet-sized homes is costing $130,000, about 10 times what some other cities are spending. Five more villages are planned to open later.

LA Times Senior Writer Doug Smith reports on the progress, and higher-than-usual costs, of erecting tiny home villages in a City of Los Angeles effort to take on its ballooning homelessness crisis.

"Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the program in March," writes Smith, "signaling that the concept of sheltering people in tiny homes, long neglected in Los Angeles, had emerged as a leading strategy in the city’s response to a federal lawsuit alleging it has done too little to get homeless people off the streets."

National rent control takes a step forward as AOC unveils housing-focused poverty amelioration plan

2019-09-26T20:00:00-04:00

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has unveiled a series of sweeping legislative proposals that could, among other things, reshape access to housing in America.

The so-called A Just Society: Uplift Our Workers Act plan is made up of six separate legislative proposals that each addresses a different facet of ameliorating poverty in the United States.

Among them, The Place to Prosper Act would, for example, institute nationwide rent control, regulate corporate landlords, and provide federally-mandated tenant protections. The bill would cap rent increases at three-percent per year while also mandating that landlords keep rental units in good repair, and includes $10 billion over a decade to remove building-borne toxins like lead contamination.

The bill would also hold back highway funding from areas that do not actively support equitable development strategies. Along this vein, the bill takes aim at the imposition of parking and lot size minimum requirements by municipalities, a...

Homesteading in America

2019-07-16T19:40:00-04:00

It’s also not hard to picture oneself as a homesteader. The land is not free but it is cheap—some of the cheapest in the United States. In many respects, a person could live here in this vast, empty space like the pioneers did on the Great Plains—except you’d have a truck instead of a mule, and some solar panels, possibly even a cell-phone signal. And legal weed.

"The San Luis Valley, with its cheap land, was a sort of magnet for these off-gridders," writes Ted Conover in his fascinating long read for Harper's Magazine about homesteaders on the margins of America. "There were a few hundred of them in total. Nationwide there are probably several thousand people living off the grid. No authoritative numbers exist, but off-grid life seems to be growing, often in states with cheap land (Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri), sunshine and cheap land (Nevada, Arizona, Texas), and/or frontier appeal (Alaska, Idaho)."

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti taking 'full responsibility' for city's homelessness response

2019-06-13T14:15:00-04:00

When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti took office in 2013, the city was home to 22,993 homeless residents [...]. The number of unhoused people living within city limits now stands at 36,300—and 75 percent are unsheltered. With homelessness up 58 percent on his watch, the mayor struck an apologetic tone in a letter sent to residents Tuesday.

"As your mayor, I take full responsibility for our response to this crisis," wrote Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in an open letter this week. "And like everyone who has seen families in tents or spoken to a homeless veteran in need, I am both heartbroken and impatient. While we have housed more homeless Angelenos than ever before in our city’s history, it’s not enough. We must respond like it’s an earthquake — and do more, faster."

Garcetti's response follows the release of sobering statistics on extreme poverty in Los Angeles County; counting nearly 59,000 homeless people countywide and 36,300 within the City of LA.

As Brutalism gains new popularity, what are the mental health consequences of concrete architecture?

2019-03-06T16:17:00-05:00

Antipathy to the “concrete jungle” is rooted in the assumption that concrete-heavy environments are by nature detrimental to psychological health. One study of more than 4 million Swedes, published in 2004 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, seemed to suggest that moving from a rural to an urban environment had a detrimental effect on individuals’ mental health.

"Has the material been made a bogeyman for the urban environment – assumed to be harsh and unforgiving, rather than liberating and inclusive – when many of the problems it seems to embody are more directly related to how inequality and segregation manifest in cities?," writes Lynsey Hanley for the excellent Guardian concrete week series.

The 'other' Hong Kong photographed by Pascal Greco

2018-10-11T15:17:00-04:00

[...] medium- and low-income residents can’t afford land, while the city’s wealth explodes and attracts economic activity that doesn’t keep its poor residents in the loop. This was the Hong Kong Greco wanted to show. “Perhaps one should adopt a special lens in looking at Hong Kong, not only to see its superficial beauty, but also the social undercurrents that sustain its structures,” writes Dr. Ernest Chui in Greco’s book.

CityLab editorial fellow Karim Doumar presents the stunning black/white Polaroid shots from Swiss photographer and filmmaker Pascal Greco's new book, Hong Kong - Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies, documenting the gritty housing environments of Hong Kong's population at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Photo: Pascal Greco

Pritzker Prize laureate Balkrishna Doshi: architecture needs to invest in dignity of low-income housing

2018-03-12T13:35:00-04:00

Speaking to the Guardian after the announcement of his award, Doshi said that architects and urban planners involved in low-income housing projects – as well as architectural education – needed to move away from their focus on the designer as individual to being far more collaborative, compassionate and invested in the dignity of those they house.

Study up on the impressive body of work of freshly minted Pritzker Prize laureate, Balkrishna Doshi, here.

L.A.'s homeless count nearly doubled in six years

2018-02-10T09:00:00-05:00

The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. But the crisis has been decades in the making. If homelessness continues to escalate at current rates, it will swamp even the best efforts.

Despite declaring homelessness in the city an 'emergency' and committing drastically increased funds to housing and services, Los Angeles is failing to improve the lives of its unsheltered citizens.

Lifting poor neighborhoods out of poverty with alternative investment models

2017-12-06T14:08:00-05:00

How do you raise the standard of living in the poorest neighborhoods in the country? That’s what community developers, typically nonprofits that build and finance affordable housing, have tried to do over the last few decades. And yet [...] many of these communities remain stuck in poverty. [...] This problem has stumped community developers for decades. But two local nonprofits think they’ve hit on something: They’ve created a private equity fund.

New report shows 60-percent drop in U.S. affordable-housing stock between 2010 and 2016

2017-10-24T14:20:00-04:00

The number of apartments deemed affordable for very low-income families across the United States fell by more than 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to a new report by Freddie Mac. The report by the government-backed mortgage financier is the first to compare rent increases in specific units over time. It examined loans that the corporation had financed twice between 2010 and 2016, allowing a comparison of the exact same rental units and how their affordability changed.

The Washington Post reports about a new report by Freddie Mac: "More renters flooded the market after people lost their homes in the housing crisis. The apartment vacancy rate was 8 percent in 2009, compared to 4 percent in 2017. That trend, coupled with a stagnant supply of apartments, resulted in increased rents."

Some of the states with the highest decreases in the percentage of affordable units were Colorado and North Carolina.

How social equality is linked to health, as manifested in the built environment

2017-08-29T14:13:00-04:00

Residents of the outer suburbs tend to travel much longer distances between home, work and the services they need daily. Getting around necessarily defaults to the car, which has serious long-term implications for health. Driving is particularly associated with extended sitting in a confined space and, as a result, not getting enough exercise each day. When poorer communities are located in areas of lesser amenity due to lower housing costs, this exacerbates their health problems.

The close correlation between socioeconomic status and health has long been out of question. The built environment and the environmental context serve as direct social determinants of health.

Due to lower housing costs, poorer communities are often restricted to residing in areas of lesser amenity that exacerbate the obstacles to mental and physical well-being—lack of quality services and infrastructure, scarcity of green space and long work commutes challenge health. Additionally, poor building design and construction, and the excessive noise that it causes, can significantly contribute to stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and sometimes even neighbor conflict and violence. What might appear as light threats, such as sleep deprivation which is linked to obesity, serve as risk factors for many chronic diseases.

While high-density living is increasingly trumpeted as “healthy,” health and well-being of poor communities in high-rise housing heavily depends on the specifics—geographic...

Poverty is "a state of mind," states HUD Secretary Ben Carson

2017-05-25T17:36:00-04:00

Poverty is largely “a state of mind”, housing secretary Ben Carson has claimed, dismaying observers who had modest hopes for his tenure. Carson, the neurosurgeon who heads the agency charged with helping low-income Americans gain access to affordable housing, told Sirius XM radio: “You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”

"And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way back down to the bottom," Carson continued. The remarks were widely condemned by experts on poverty and homelessness.

As the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Carson is in charge of providing affordable and public housing to the disenfranchised. According to almost universal consensus by experts, poverty is not a choice, but rather a condition attributable to a range of a factors, from where you were born to the color of your skin to bad luck.

Most Americans will live below the poverty line at some point in their life, research by the US government has discovered. In 2015, 13.5% (43.1 million) Americans lived in poverty. This far exceeds most other wealthy countries. And, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, "the United States has the greatest share of renters (28.5%) who are severely cost burdened, spending more than half of t...

HUD head Ben Carson thinks creature comforts are not for those on Section 8

2017-05-09T13:22:00-04:00

As he toured facilities for the poor in Ohio last week, Mr. Carson, the neurosurgeon-turned-housing secretary, joked that a relatively well-appointed apartment complex for veterans lacked “only pool tables.” He inquired at one stop whether animals were allowed. At yet another, he nodded, plainly happy, as officials explained how they had stacked dozens of bunk beds inside a homeless shelter and purposefully did not provide televisions.

In a recent visit to a public housing facility in Columbus, Ohio, HUD head Ben Carson reiterated his stance that anyone receiving Section 8 housing vouchers or federal assistance should not get too comfortable, as this would lead them to simply want to stay in their federally provided digs. Ironically, studies have shown that for the chronic homeless population, remaining in one place is actually much cheaper for the state than having them constantly bouncing between shelters and the street once emergency room visits and legal fees are added into the mix. Carson did make allowances for those who are mentally ill or unable to provide for themselves, but in his view there is to be no rest for who he defines as the able-bodied.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the troubled relationship between infrastructure and race: "We ought to do it better than we did it the last time"

2016-04-28T13:53:00-04:00

As a child, Anthony Foxx knew he couldn’t ride his bike far from home without being blocked by a freeway. By the time he became U.S. transportation secretary he understood why. “We now know — overwhelmingly — that our urban freeways were almost always routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods, creating disconnections from opportunity that exist to this day,” [...] “I really believe that this is an issue that has been on the shelf collecting dust for a long time,” Foxx said.

Inside Aravena's open source plans for low-cost yet upgradable housing

2016-04-06T14:35:00-04:00

After Alejandro Aravena accepted the Pritzker Prize yesterday, his firm Elemental released four open source plans for low income housing that, according to the firm's website, balance the constraints of "low-rise high density, without overcrowding, with possibility of expansion (from social housing to middle-class dwelling)." The plans were released partly as a response to the looming housing crisis of 2030, in which it is estimated that two billion people will be living under the poverty line.

Aravena's self-described "incremental housing" is partly a governmental effort, and partly an individual one. By providing plans for proven models of sustainable housing, people can have greater agency in housing themselves. "Given the magnitude of the housing shortage, we won't solve this problem unless we add people's own resources and building capacity to that of governments and the market," reads Elemental's statement.

The four projects Elemental has released plans for are Quinta Monroy, V...

Los Angeles approves plans to tackle homelessness crisis, but funding is still unclear

2016-02-10T13:44:00-05:00

In a fresh bid to confront a problem that has confounded lawmakers for decades, Los Angeles city and county officials approved sweeping plans Tuesday aimed at getting thousands of homeless people off the streets. But one crucial question remains unanswered: Where will most of the money come from? [...] The renewed government attention to homelessness was spurred in part by a 12% surge in people living on the streets [...] pushing the total to more than 44,000 homeless people countywide.

Previously in the Archinect news:

LA's freeway system is becoming an increasingly crowded 'neighborhood' for the city's homeless

2015-12-28T13:00:00-05:00

The freeway system, which Southern Californians once saw as a ticket to freedom, an emblem of L.A.'s love of individuality and movement, increasingly serves as a landscape of hard luck and a desperate sort of community — a place to hunker down. [...] As the homeless population grows in a city whose public realm is the haggard product of several decades of neglect, the freeway has taken on a crucial, if often dispiriting, neighborhood role despite itself.

"The ranks of the chronically homeless in Los Angeles County have grown by more than 50% in the last two years, to more than 12,000 people, according to one study. If you count all the people who are homeless at least part of the time, the figure rises to an estimated 44,000."

A global shift towards a vegan diet is necessary to stave off the worst of climate change, says new UN report

2015-11-25T23:12:00-05:00

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today. As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

"Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: 'Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.'"

Related coverage:

Africa's challenges and opportunities to get urbanization right

2015-10-14T14:15:00-04:00

This is important for Africa, where despite high urbanisation rates the development focus has been primarily rural. Consider Ghana. The country’s urban population has grown from four million in 1984 to more than 14 million today. Fifty one percent of Ghanaians now live in cities. While urbanisation rates vary across Africa, Ghana reflects an overall global trend towards a predominantly urban future. Ghana demonstrates how cities can be highly productive in Africa.

Related on Archinect:

Los Angeles to declare homelessness in the city an 'emergency' and pledge $100 million

2015-09-22T13:46:00-04:00

Los Angeles elected leaders announced Tuesday that they will declare a “state of emergency” on the growing homelessness problem in the city and commit $100 million toward housing and other services for homeless people. [...] "If we want to be a great city that hosts the Olympics and shows itself off to the world,” Cedillo said, “we shouldn't have 25,000 to 50,000 people sleeping on the streets.”

Related on Archinect:

Housing mobility vs. America's growing slum problem

2015-08-14T15:15:00-04:00

If America decides to take on its growing slum problem, people will need to think hard about how to do so. Mobility programs are proven to work for the families who move, but what happens to the neighborhoods that people leave? Can affordable-housing projects in low-income areas also help poor families succeed, or are they doomed to fail their residents, no matter how nice they are, because of where they are located?

Related on Archinect:

The many lives of Johannesburg’s notorious Ponte tower

2015-06-19T17:48:00-04:00

The Ponte saga is a classic South African story. Once a Jacuzzi-filled playground for the segregated white elite in the apartheid era, then falling into chaos in the 1990s as the wealthy fled to the suburbs, then the object of failed luxury-condo schemes, the tower is now undergoing a renaissance as an icon of Johannesburg’s urban revitalization. [...] The hollow core began to fill with garbage and rubble – several stories high.

Pope Francis calls for "morally driven" city design in his climate-change encyclical

2015-06-19T15:07:00-04:00

Collectively, the encyclical affirms how important it is to make the moral case for city design. Too often, developers, urban planners and city leaders seem to think that it is obvious or implied why the decisions they make are in the best interest of the public. But there is no shortcut to articulating why our planning choices speak to the fundamental human dignity of the communities we’re working in.

"Given the interrelationship between living space and human behaviour, those who design buildings, neighbourhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting. It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. Here too, we see how important it is that urban planning always take into consideration the views of those who will live in these areas."

Pope Francis tells it like it is in his latest 184-page encyclical, in response to humanity's "principal challenge" of global climate change.

Vatican's Renovated Public Restrooms Provides Showers, Haircuts for the Homeless

NYC's public-housing woes

2015-05-19T20:24:00-04:00

Still, when Mayor Bill de Blasio today unveiled his plan for New York’s troubled housing authority, NYCHA, dismantling these aging towers was not a piece of it. The plan calls for charging more for parking, redeploying staff to other agencies to save costs and leasing land within the housing complexes to private developers to save money. [...] So why does New York City still have so many high-rise housing projects?

San Francisco's new pilot project to house the homeless

2015-03-11T15:22:00-04:00

The Navigation Center is one of the most innovative homeless-help experiments being undertaken in the U.S. — meaning that when it opens the week of March 16 at an old high school at 16th and Mission streets, it will be watched not just by every homeless camper in the vicinity, but by aid agencies around the nation. [...] The Navigation Center will be doing this as a pilot project for eight to 18 months, depending on its success.

So gentrification is just a myth after all?

2015-01-19T14:22:00-05:00

It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are.

What's your take on John Buntin's Slate piece?

Paris and its Suburbs Will Join to Become the Métropole du Grand Paris

2014-08-27T16:13:00-04:00

France has embarked on an ambitious plan to remake Paris -- and, in the process, solve its suburbs problem. On Jan. 1, 2016, Paris, along with Clichy and more than 120 of its closest suburbs, will be enfolded into the Métropole du Grand Paris, an ambitious but still ill-defined project to create a sort of uber-city -- an overarching metropolitan government for the greater Paris area, encompassing around 7 million inhabitants and over 270 square miles.

This ambitious project will be the first of its kind in the world, one that planners hope can become a model for other cities. The Parisian suburbs – or banlieues – are notoriously underprivileged. Generally, Paris and its environs are markedly economically segregated: the central city is basically unaffordable to all but the very rich. Meanwhile, the suburbs – such as Clichy-sous-Bois (Clichy, for short) – tend to lack cafes, markets, train stations, and other trappings of vibrant urban life. A few years ago, Clichy and other poor suburbs gained notoriety after violent riots broke out.

By enfolding the suburbs and the central city into one giant Métropole, Parisian officials hope to mitigate the dire conditions of the former. With a shared tax base, the suburbs would get much need revenue for infrastructure and other urban projects. Moreover, the plan would hopefully reduce the notorious mess of the current bureaucracy.

More importantly, the Métropole would work in opposition to many...

Inside the famous Phnom Penh cinema that has become a living nightmare

2014-07-28T15:19:00-04:00

The Hemakcheat was once one of Cambodia’s most beloved cinemas and Meas Sopheap one of its star dancers. Today it is a notorious slum, and Meas one of hundreds who shelter there. [...] Hundreds of men, women and children shelter here, many on the ground-floor auditorium where they are shrouded in permanent darkness among hundreds of bats that screech and flap their wings constantly. [...] More waste falls from makeshift floors constructed above. The rotten stench of sewage is overpowering.

Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest Slum

2014-07-22T13:54:00-04:00

Venezuelan soldiers and officials began moving hundreds of families on Tuesday out of a half-built 45-story skyscraper that dominates the Caracas skyline and is thought to be the world's tallest slum. Residents from the "Tower of David” were going to new homes in the town of Cua, south of Caracas [...]. President Nicolas Maduro's government has not yet said what it will do with the tower, but one local newspaper reported Chinese banks were buying it to restore to its original purpose.

Previously: