In 2010, Nick Williams oversaw construction of luxury apartments at London’s One Hyde Park, where a penthouse valued at 175 million pounds ($297 million) sold last month.

Now he works at the other end of the property ladder, building discounted homes for those shut out of the boom.

Local officials have “realized the housing crisis for people who are neither rich nor poor is massive [...]” — bloomberg.com

For most of the 20th century, Atlanta was known for its public housing. The city had pioneered the concept in the 1930s [...]

Two decades later, that proportion has fallen all the way to zero. [...]

Looking at these two decades of rapid residential change, Atlanta native and filmmaker King Williams is looking for an answer to a seemingly obvious question. With his in-production documentary The Atlanta Way, Williams asks: Where did all of these people end up? — theatlanticcities.com

In the third article in our Typecast series, writer Brad Fox travels to Todt Hill Houses on Staten Island. Safe, suburban, and well-maintained, Todt Hill defies many of the stereotypes of New York City housing projects. Unlike the Lower East Side’s Smith Houses, which were constructed in the place of demolished tenements, Todt Hill predates most of the single-family homes in its surrounding neighborhood. — urbanomnibus.net

Affordable housing is on New York City’s mind. A critical mass of civic organizations, academic institutions, city agencies, advocacy groups, and others are pondering the essential and perennial issue of how to ensure that the city becomes affordable for the extraordinarily diverse population that makes it work. [...]

At the same time, a decades-old strategy to maintain housing affordability is finding a groundswell of support from an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders. — urbanomnibus.net

The Real Affordability for All Coalition — made up of 50 tenant advocate and labor union groups — is accusing Airbnb of “throwing gasoline on a fire” by contributing to a growing affordable housing crisis.

“After years of operating an illegal enterprise in New York, your company is now apparently interested in paying your fair share of taxes and announcing that development as though you are some kind of charitable organization bestowing your riches on our city [...]” — nydailynews.com

Little remains of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, a mid-century public housing complex once home to as many as 15,000 people. The poorly maintained high rises, rife with gang violence, were eventually demolished (the final one came down in 2011). [...]

The Chicago Housing Authority hopes to see it all redeveloped soon. [...]

CHA says half the new residential units to be market rate, another 30 percent public housing, and the remaining 20 percent affordable housing. — The Atlantic Cities

With titanium facades swinging like jiving skirts and windows staggered like towers of toppling coins, the chaotic energy of the latest apartment designs for Battersea power station can only mean one thing: Frank Gehry is in town.

As the 85-year-old visionary architect behind the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao outlined plans for 700 apartments in London – his first English buildings – he walked straight into a raging debate about the capital's affordable housing crisis. — theguardian.com

With around 10,000 lots scattered mostly across the Midwest and the Central Plains, Rolfe and Reynolds are about equivalent in size to a public-housing agency in a midsize city — and in an important way, they play the same role. Those living in public housing are generally required to pay up to 30 percent of their household income as their share of the rent. Rolfe and Reynolds’s tenants pay on average closer to 20 percent. — NYT

In collaboration with the Preservation League of New York State and New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with $39 million of private, state, and federal funds, Common Ground and Beyer Blinder Belle (the architects behind the Grand Central Station renovations) were able to successfully convert the decrepit building back into a livable residence with 416 single occupancy apartments. — untappedcities.com

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...]

In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area. — Marin Independent Journal

To make housing affordable again, we need to catch up to decades-worth of unmet demand, over the next few years. In many cities, this means goals measured in the tens of thousands of new homes; in the fastest-growing cities, it means hundreds of thousands. Build enough housing and (economists and experience both tell us) prices should at least stabilise. Want social justice? Build a lot more housing. — theguardian.com

San Francisco is practically the reductio ad absurdum of gentrification: It’s already land limited on three sides by water, and the massive rise of the tech industry over the last few decades has dramatically increased both the population of the area and its wealth. [...]

But the blame shouldn’t go to the tech companies or their employees moving to San Francisco, however despicable some might be. Blame San Francisco for being pleasant, and its policymakers for being foolish — Quartz

With the help of young UK architects, London housing association Peabody is already looking to the future of social housing with their "Small Projects Panel" competition launched this past November.

Peabody recently announced 20 shortlisted proposals that have advanced to the last stage. Each team will be interviewed before the jury picks 6-8 firms by the end of January. The winning firms will help Peabody develop new housing schemes that have a maximum of 20 homes. — bustler.net

Last week, the city of Phoenix made a startling announcement. The Arizona capital had previously identified 222 chronically homeless veterans living in the city, more than half of them veterans of the Vietnam War. [...]

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said last week that every last one of them now had a roof overhead. The city has effectively ended chronic veteran homelessness, according to the mayor [...].

Phoenix did this – prioritizing housing first, then wrapping other services around it. — theatlanticcities.com

New York-based H Architecture sent us their winning proposal for the Sejong 2-2 M2 Block Public Housing Development competition. In celebrating its 50-year apartment building history, the Korea Land and Housing Corporation opened a call for ideas for its new 77,000m2 housing development in Sejong City, South Korea. — bustler.net