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In December, developers closed on $30.3 million in financing for the first phase of Arverne East, a master-planned community and revitalization project within a 116-acre oceanfront site in the Arverne and Edgemere neighborhoods in Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula. Led by real estate firms L+M... View full entry
One Virginia family received the keys to their new 3D-printed home in time for Christmas. The home is Habitat for Humanity's first 3D-printed home in the nation, according to a Habitat news release. Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN it partnered with Alquist, a 3D printing company, earlier this year to begin the process. Alquist's crew printed the house. — CNN
The milestone was marked by a ribbon-cutting ceremony on December 21st. The 1,200-square-foot house has three bedrooms, two full baths, and the concrete portion of the structure was printed in 12 hours. The home was built for April Stringfield, who purchased the home through Habitat for... View full entry
Even as smaller projects are stuck in limbo due to market uncertainties and astronomical construction costs, the city’s colossal multi-phased projects like those at Treasure Island, Mission Rock, Pier 70 and Power Station will steam full speed ahead. Streets are being laid out, sidewalks poured, trees planted, streetlights installed and buildings are sprouting from the ground. — The San Francisco Chronicle
The city is currently in the process of transforming Treasure Island, the artificial holm named after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel and created for the 1939 World’s Fair, into an 8,000-unit residential neighborhood with below-market housing and retail amenities that is anticipated to host a... View full entry
Stefano Boeri Architetti has released a short documentary on the Trudo Vertical Forest, which the firm bills as “the first social housing vertical forest in the world.” Built in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, the project draws its inspiration from the firm’s Bosco Verticale in Milan. View this... View full entry
For reasons both tragic and optimistic, 2021 was a year where regulations and policy were never far from the media spotlight. While this is true for instance due to the overhanging impact of COVID-19 on everything from school operations to international travel, 2021 was also a year that saw both... View full entry
For many students, the nostalgic stereotype of sharinga utilitarian dorm with a new roommate or splitting a cheap off-campus apartment is an unattainable scenario.
According to a 2020 report from UCLA, 1 in 5 community college students, 1 in 10 California State University students, and 1 in 20 University of California students experienced homelessness that year.
— Bloomberg
California, which has become ground zero for the affordable housing crisis in America, has been boosting college enrollment (with some exceptions) resulting in separate 16,000-person-long waitlists across two systems for available space in dorm facilities which have added some 35,000 beds since... View full entry
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Department of Housing (DOH) Commissioner Marisa Novara announced on December 6th more than $1 billion in affordable housing through the Chicago Recovery Plan, as part of Lightfoot’s 2022 budget. This is the largest investment in affordable housing in... View full entry
COVID-19 also showed us the divide that we have in the city. There are BIPOC communities and communities with lower incomes that have very poor-quality public realms that we need to focus on more closely. People who live in the South Bronx need to have the same kind of opportunities to be outdoors and in quality settings in ways that they didn't before. — The Planning Report
Anita Laremont, the newly appointed Director of the NYC Department of City Planning and Chair of the City Planning Commission, when asked about her priorities in light of Mayor Bill de Blasio's term coming to an end soon: "We believe our priorities will continue to be the new mayor's priorities in... View full entry
Intelligent City, a Canadian company focused on innovation in housing, has offered a glimpse inside their new factory in Delta, British Columbia. The facility, which has now begun building mid-to-high-rise urban housing projects for Canada and the United States, will use advanced robotics to... View full entry
For instance, by the end of this year, approximately 20,100 units in older buildings (that previously served other purposes) will be starting a new life as apartments — that’s almost double the number of apartments converted in 2020 and 2019 combined. So far, through adaptive reuse alone, this new decade has already created nearly 32,000 apartments, 41% of which are in former office buildings. — RENTCafé
The shift to work-from-home caused by the coronavirus pandemic has also resulted in office spaces becoming one-quarter of the adaptive reuse projects that will make more than 12,000 rental units available by the end of next year. Hospitals, hotels, and even a houseboat are among the disused... View full entry
The pressure to remake neighborhoods like Clairemont is due not to some sudden shift in what people want out of a home but rather to the sweeping social changes that have already played out inside them. As the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson wrote in “Crabgrass Frontier,” his seminal history of America’s suburbs: “No society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.” —
Applications for ADUs in San Diego have skyrocketed since 2018, part of a nationwide trend that is changing the way some cities are tackling the affordability crisis which has gotten out of hand as a direct result of antiquated housing policy that insisted on the type of single-family... View full entry
In an effort to tackle the effects of America’s ongoing affordable housing crisis on LGBTQ seniors, KFA and Leong Leong are teaming up with the Ariadne Getty Foundation on the design of a five-story apartment complex that will help meet the needs of the greater Los Angeles community. The... View full entry
A stalled plan that would have added over 3 million square feet of office space to Downtown LA has gotten a second life thanks to a post-pandemic reimagining that seeks to address a statewide shortage of affordable housing. The updated Civic Center Master Development Plan (CCMDP) proposed by... View full entry
What we think of today as “Red Vienna” was, in many respects, a highly fragile, contingent, and audacious effort; it is little short of a minor miracle that so much decommodified housing was built at a time when reactionary Catholicism and fascist politics were ascendant on the national scale in Austria. — PLATFORM
Penned by Joseph Heathcott for Platform, the article takes a closer look into one of the boldest architectural experiments of the twentieth century that can still be seen in Vienna today. Between 1923 and 1934, the socialist-controlled municipal government constructed over four hundred Hofs... View full entry
As with many states, California is experiencing a lack of affordable housing, with 1.8 million homes needed by 2025 to satisfy the state’s housing needs. At present, the median home price in California has risen above $800,000, while more than 100,000 residents sleeping outside or in cars every... View full entry
