Archinect - News

Studio Gang-designed agricultural education center in Brooklyn breaks ground

2024-06-07T15:22:00-04:00

Last weekend, the Studio Gang-designed Marlboro Agricultural Education Center (MAEC) broke ground in Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood. The new 9,900-square-foot, $18.2 million project transforms the site of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Marlboro Houses into an education, job training, nutrition and urban agriculture hub.

The Center is being delivered as part of the New York City Department of Design and Construction’s Design-Build program. It aims to build on efforts to strengthen food autonomy and security in underserved neighborhoods. It also strives to empower young adults in these communities to engage with local, sustainable food production.

The Center will feature a rooftop greenhouse dedicated to hydro- and aquaponics. It will also include spaces dedicated to community activities and outreach, including a teaching kitchen, a pantry where produce grown on-site will be packaged before being distributed to neighborhood residents, and a multipurpose room that wi...

Studio Libeskind's refreshing social housing development debuts at the Sumner Houses in Brooklyn

2024-05-24T18:25:00-04:00

Studio Libeskind has inaugurated its new social housing development in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, called The Atrium at Sumner, after a three-year, $132 million construction. The 11-story, 132,418-square-foot development yields 190 total units, with an 8,309-square-foot community space located on the ground floor along Marcus Garvey Boulevard.

Image: Hufton+Crow

The building’s design features a dramatic interplay of opening and solids in a folding form finished in distinct optic white EIFS facade cladding that distinguishes it from the brick buildings on the 66-year-old NYCHA campus. A year-round interior garden gives name to the development, which features a host of amenities included to support aging-in-place alternatives for senior residents of the studio and one-bedroom apartments, 25 of which come fully adapted for those living with disabilities or who are visually or hearing-impaired.

Image: Hufton+Crow

The project came together through a consortium of stakeholders that includes the New...

New York City is still slow in meeting its 2030 solar pledge

2023-04-14T17:48:00-04:00

New York City has pledged to reach 1,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2030 — enough energy to power 250,000 homes, according to the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Justice. But state data shows that its current pace of installation will land short of that goal, leaving officials and advocates looking for ways to break down barriers to installation.

As Gothamist reported, 90% of the city’s energy grid is derived from fossil fuels. The effort to counteract this with rooftop photovoltaics is being stymied by the building codes and cost of installation, despite remarkable gains in solar capacity overall.

A proposed new program called Public Solar NYC could offer solutions, along with a slate of regulatory changes. The city’s tax burden is notoriously tough on low-income families, adding to the frustration that the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance's Daniel Chu and others feel as the deadline draws near.

“Most of the power plants in New York City are located within environmental justice communities with overwhelming numbers of affordable housing or NYCHA projects,” he told the blog. “They are currently missing out on the opportunities that other folks in wealthier communities and non-disadvantaged communities can take advantage of. We need to prioritize disadvantaged communities in the process of transitioning out and building t...

NYC Mayor Eric Adams announces new adaptive reuse task force

2022-07-22T18:01:00-04:00

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a new adaptive reuse task force that will explore the vast untapped potential for rehabilitation present in the city’s considerable stock of outdated office buildings.

Born out of the new Local Law 43, the task force is charged with producing recommendations by year’s end for how to best approach the rehabilitation of these buildings in the face of crises of affordability, homelessness, and the loss of tax revenue caused by corporate America’s yet-unresolved pandemic exodus from the city.

The creation of the panel indicates the further migration of large global cities towards adaptive reuse policies in the hopes of making strides in the area of sustainability before the end of the decade.

The 12-member panel is composed of four staffers from the city’s Department of Buildings, Economic Development Corporation, Depa...

NYC plan to allow cannabis cultivation on public housing rooftops runs into federal hurdles

2022-04-19T17:34:00-04:00

At an April 9 panel discussion in Albany, Adams said his team was exploring whether the city could allow cannabis cultivation on the rooftops of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) facilities. The idea, he said, would be to employ NYCHA residents to staff and oversee the greenhouses as the state continues to roll out its recreational marijuana program for adults. “The jobs can come from NYCHA residents. The proceeds and education can go right into employing people right in the area.”

As part of its economic development agenda, the Adams administration has been pushing an ambitious pilot program for rooftop cultivation on federally-funded NYCHA public housing properties. The current laws, however, still classify marijuana as a controlled substance, leading to an inevitable impasse. An inbound decriminalization bill written by New York Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler could clear the way for legal grow operations on such property via an update to the federal guidelines, which a spokesperson for the mayor told Gothamist are held over from a pernicious era of public policymaking.

“[Federal] laws still on the books continue to harm the same communities that have been targeted for decades,” City Hall spokesperson Charles Lutvak explained. “The House passed legislation to this effect earlier this month, and we need those who are obstructing progress at the federal level to follow New York’s lead.”

Related on Archinect: Michael Kimmelman on some newer rays of light ...

"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."

How New York City's luxury housing tax could finance affordable units

2017-02-23T19:44:00-05:00

While President Trump talks repeatedly about fixing America’s inner cities, it’s a good bet that in the coming years, New York and other large metropolitan areas will need to be more self-reliant in solving pressing problems, especially low-income housing. [...] Fortunately, there’s an already tested alternative: an annual luxury housing tax, levied on new high-end condos and rentals, which would feed a self-sustaining fund dedicated to develop truly affordable units.

Michael Kimmelman on the state of affordable housing in NYC

2016-01-26T17:28:00-05:00

New York City once set the standard for subsidized housing. The city started out building and maintaining tens of thousands of apartments for working families, sponsoring job training and social programs. It ran a budget surplus. [...] Now the Village is like a gated playground for runaway wealth. Subsidized apartments all across town are converting to market-rate rentals and condos faster than City Hall can build affordable units or preserve old ones.

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?