Archinect - News

Terner Center's report on construction defect liability turns a new page for California housing reformers

2024-07-26T11:48:00-04:00

The latest report from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation on the stasis of multifamily developments in California has identified existing construction defect liability laws as a barrier to enabling housing justice statewide.

This issue involves the risk taken on by developers of condominium projects and particularly affects BIPOC communities who are less likely to be homeowners than their peers. California’s policies are therein compared to others in the United States and Canada. The findings will help lead to legal reforms to increase homeownership and should be considered especially by architects working in the state's surging multifamily market.

Architect Liu Thai Ker on the success of Singapore’s social housing experiments 40 years on

2024-05-28T20:26:00-04:00

Even though record prices on the secondary market have heightened anxiety about the rising costs of living in Singapore, one of the world’s most expensive cities, public housing remains broadly affordable — at least for those who qualify for government subsidies to buy units. Today, close to 80 percent of Singapore’s residents live in public housing, and about 90 percent of the units are owned on a 99-year lease.

The architect of Singapore’s successful “social engineering” campaign after 1965, Liu Thai Ker, is a Malaysian-born Yale graduate and former understudy of I.M. Pei, who told the New York Times recently that he was “sad” to see the city-state’s current market dynamics affecting some of his democratizing designs from the 1980s.

Singapore has for years ranked alongside Vienna among the world’s leading cities for the development of social housing. The 86-year-old Liu continues his work as the Founding Chairman of the Singapore/Shanghai-based MORROW Architects + Planners, an entity he began in 2017 following the culmination of his 25-year run at RSP Architects Planners & Engineers.

Presales commence on Bjarke Ingels' new Nabr development in San Jose

2022-09-27T14:27:00-04:00

Nearly a year after its initial unveiling, Nabr, the housing startup co-founded by Bjarke Ingels, has announced the beginning of presales for the first site in its BIG-designed development in downtown San Jose.

Featuring updated designs for its three-tower block, the firm is promoting the Silicon Valley initiative as a “people-first housing company.” Prospective residents will have the opportunity to purchase a home through either a traditional mortgage servicer or via the Leap lease-to-own alternative.

Ingels has said repeatedly since Nabr's initial announcement that the venture is an attempt to mitigate the barriers to homeownership in America, an issue which has disproportionately affected young people and student loan borrowers, while pushing the broader architectural community to explore new approaches to the concept of housing overall.

Image courtesy Nabr

Prices for a place in SoFA One, the first tower in Nabr's San Jose ensemble to come online, start around $700,000. The firm ...

Americans just keep finding new housing markets to price themselves out of

2022-02-24T08:20:00-05:00

No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many cities and states try to blunt it with recommendations to build more housing and provide subsidies for those who can’t afford the new stuff, no matter how many zoning battles are fought or homeless camps lamented, no next city, as of yet, seems better prepared than the last one was.

Like other small cities such as Reno, Nevada and Austin, Texas that have followed San Francisco and New York on a similar path toward a domineering social trend that has come to define the way we live and work in the unfurling decades of the 21st century. Americans on both coasts have been cycling through skyrocketing housing markets since the end of the Recession, with states like Texas and Florida seeing an incredible influx of out-of-state residents in the last two years alone.

One assessment says Spokane underbult a total of about 32,000 affordable units in the 2010s, leading to a median home value that has risen some 60% since the beginning of the pandemic. The jump has caused a near-zero availability rental market and concern for SP director of community and economic development Steve MacDonald, who himself moved from there Southern California in 2017.

“I’m realizing more and more how important the future prosperity of this city is about getting housing right,” he told the Ti...

Megamansions might be making their occupants unhappy

2019-06-12T14:31:00-04:00

American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973[...] the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015. But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet,[...], “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

For many homeowners in America, happiness is often incorrectly measured by how flatteringly the scale of one's home can be compared to those around them. Since the construction of Levittown and other post-war suburban developments, American homes have, on average, been built with incrementally larger footprints in a tireless search for the largest house on the block.

Interior of Versailles House under construction.

"To be clear," Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic writes, "having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby."

And not only can happiness not be achieved through square footage, but these increasingly large homes also breed unhappiness through a variety of means. They contribute, for instance, to the increasing isolation of the families that occupy them - if a family can afford a large home with separate rooms, appliances and products for all its ...

Laguna Beach homeowners hit with $1-million fine over illegal seawall

2018-08-13T14:23:00-04:00

Environmentalists are celebrating a precedent-setting vote Thursday by the California Coastal Commission to tear down a seawall protecting an oceanfront home in Laguna Beach. After the previous owner received retroactive approval for the previously unpermitted seawall, Jeffrey and Tracy Katz bought the home on Victoria Beach. They performed an extensive remodel, which was completed in January and increased the value of the home from $14 million to $25 million.

Under the 1977 Coastal Act, beachfront properties are required to have substantial setbacks in order not to interfere with the natural flow of sand along the coast. Built in 1951, prior to the Act, the property in question was allowed to put up a seawall in 2005 under the condition it be removed if there was new development on the site.

Stating that the work done qualifies as repair and maintenance, the Katzes and their lawyer argued that the renovation, which had received city approval, did not require a commission permit. In the end, however, the commission was unanimous in their decision to punish the couple.

In China, 70% of millenials own property

2017-04-06T17:44:00-04:00

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably read some think piece about how millenials aren’t buying homes. Sometimes this is construed as a cultural thing, but it probably has more to due with coming of age during and after the Great Recession.

In any case, according to a BBC article, that’s not universally the case. In China, 70% of millennials own their own home and 91% plan to buy one in the next five years. Meanwhile, in Mexico, 46% of millennials own property and, in France, 41% do. The US edges out the UK and the UAE for the fourth spot, with 35% owning property.

If you can't stand the heat, get an outdoor kitchen (homeowners are, says AIA)

2017-03-23T13:02:00-04:00

Over the past century, kitchens have gone from being a back room to the center of many homes. Now, according to a new study released by the AIA, many homeowners are requesting outdoor kitchens, creating an uptick in work for residential architects. “Homeowners continue to find new ways to add value to their homes by creating more functional space, which is apparent in the rise in popularity of outdoor kitchens,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “Kitchens have become a hub for the home, now homeowners want to bring some of that activity to their outside space.”

NYC's squatters get their own graphic novel/historic documentation

2017-02-28T19:59:00-05:00

Amy Starecheski, oral historian, former squatter, and author of the recent book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Become Homeowners in New York City, gathered a group who have been documenting the squatting movement from multiple perspectives, from firsthand experience to generational remove. Below, Amy guides us through some of the documents they have gathered and created: a graphic novel, a sketchbook with instructions for DIY electrical wiring, interviews, and installations...

Thanks to Amy Starecheski, the documentation of the gritty romance of squatting in city-abandoned NYC buildings in the 1980s and 1990s can now be perused, graphic-novel style:

Single women emerge as second-strongest group of homebuyers

2016-02-24T13:48:00-05:00

It's hard to remember that just a few decades ago it was difficult, if not impossible, for a woman alone to take out a mortgage. Federal legislation changed that. And yet, it's still surprising to learn how dominant single women have become in the housing market today: Their share is second only to married couples, and twice that of single men.