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The Abu Dhabi-owned developer won planning approval for the 268-home mixed-use redevelopment of the Metropolitan Police’s HQ site in April 2016....Since then developer BL Developments has sought to increase the total number of homes by 27, from 268 to 295, with no increase in the number of affordable units or payment in lieu, meaning the level of affordable housing fell further still to only 3%. — Construction Enquirer
BL Developments, who bought the site back in 2014 for £370m, had submitted an initial proposal to transform the former Metropolitan Police headquarters into a mixed-use scheme. The plans, which involved tearing down three existing buildings to clear the way for six residential-led buildings... View full entry
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has announced that the city will be investing £25 million into constructing over 1,000 affordable prefab apartments. Funding from the city will go into purchasing small brownfield sites that will then be built on by Pocket Living, a developer specializing in... View full entry
One of the new luxury apartment buildings constructed in 1910 was the Belmont Court, on the city’s growing East Side. Plans called for a modern 24 unit-apartment building with a range of conveniences. More than a century later, the Belmont Court building still stands...According to Zillow, average apartment rents in Portland are about $1,600 per month. With studio apartments renting at just under $1,100 they’re not exactly cheap, but they cost less per square foot than newly built units. — CityObservatory
Drawing on research from housing blogger, Iain MacKenzie who runs Next Portland, Joe Cortright at CityObservatory shares some examples of affordable housing in Portland that had been considered luxury when originally constructed. The author argues that affordable housing has always been generated... View full entry
The Antepavilion program, a joint venture between the Architecture Foundation and the Arthouse Foundation, launched an international competition to design a £25,000 pop-up rooftop at Columbia and Brunswick Wharf in Hackney, north-east London. The goal was to invite architects, artists and... View full entry
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. — The New York Review of Books
"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... View full entry
Facebook announced today that it has partnered with OMA to design the masterplan for Willow Campus, a mixed-use neighborhood adjacent to their existing headquarters in Menlo Park. "The first official step will be the filing of our plan with Menlo Park in July 2017. We will begin more formal... View full entry
Now, although the horror is still raw and much about it is still unknown, it has also become clear that Grenfell exposes in the harshest possible way questions of the current state of social housing, about the accessibility, affordability and quality of homes, and their impact on people’s lives. — The Guardian
The Guardian's feature examines the new documentary Dispossession: The New Housing Swindle which addresses the build up anger surrounding the issue of affordable housing and the failed attempts at combatting it, including Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy and the effects of the 60s and... View full entry
Inside the pavilion is a long table embedded with exhibits and audio stations telling the stories of people who are either experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless, along with excerpts from data sets, state reports, urban theory, poetry, and literature. — Yale News
Working with New Haven-based homeless services provider Columbus House, students from the Yale School of Architecture designed an interactive pavilion that will be featured at this year’s festival together with an exhibition of student work in the YSoA architecture gallery showing proposals... View full entry
The Heygate Estate in London was torn down in 2014, forcing tenants out of their homes with compensation that was less than 40% of market value. Supposedly, the replacement building would have affordable housing as well. But, according to Vice, 100% of the properties sold in the building so far... View full entry
Sentinel Peak Resources, which took over the roughly 1.1-acre site in December, now believes that affordable housing is the “best beneficial use” for the land [...] Neighborhood leaders said they were interested in closing and re-purposing the site, but are awaiting more details. They stressed that regardless of any plans, they still want the city to pursue their concerns about violations at the site, which Sentinel Peak Resources has so far brushed off. — Los Angeles Times
According to the L.A. Times, “No official plan has been drafted and details are scant, but [L.A. City Council President Herb] Wesson said he was ‘unbelievably excited’ about the idea, arguing it could pave the way to convert other local drilling sites.”But converting the site — which is... View full entry
With limited funds, many American affordable housing projects aren’t in great shape. Their fate is ever more tenuous with the impending budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed by the Trump Administration. In an ironic twist of fate, the often-sorry state of... View full entry
The standard yardstick for judging housing affordability is to look at the median level of rents or home prices. As we all remember from statistics, the median is the observation in the middle of the distribution. And while for many purposes, it’s a reliable indicator of typical prices, in some neighborhoods, particularly those with a mix of expensive and cheap housing, the median is actually a weak indicator of affordability. — City Observatory
"For an illustration of this problem, imagine two neighborhoods. In both places, the median home costs $300,000. But in the first neighborhood, every home costs exactly $300,000, while in the second, there are a range of homes from $100,000 to $500,000. Although both neighborhoods have the same... View full entry
Announcing the decisions, Khan said he had fully considered all the evidence available and was “confident” both high-density developments would deliver hundreds of genuinely affordable homes for Londoners.
“Building the homes Londoners urgently need will mean town centres and suburbs becoming denser, so we expect developers to continue to come up with high-quality designs which don’t have a negative impact on their surroundings.”
— Building Design
Overruling councillors in two north London Boroughs, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has approved an Allies and Morrisson scheme in Tottenham Hale and another in Harrow by Moss Architecture; both will be high-density housing developments which together will deliver 691 new homes for Londoners within... View full entry
Although it's unclear when the furnishing/window and door fitting process takes place, one thing is certain: you can now have the basic components of an entire 400 square foot house printed in about a day from the company Apis Cor. Aside from being speedy, the $10,000 printing process is... View full entry
Adding 84,000 square feet of a custom-aluminum-facade-bearing mixed-use structure to a Metro Red Line adjacent corner of North Hollywood, Brooks + Scarpa are continuing their aesthetically pioneering work in low-income housing.The structure, deemed "NOHO on Camarillo," will defy old-school... View full entry
