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

"It looks like a prison to be honest with you," said Lynda Johnson, an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and editor and founder of KidStyleSource.com who has owned a townhouse on St. Nicholas Place for 20 years and is a member of the Hamilton Heights Homeowners Association.

Some feel the design does not fit into the context of the nearby Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District, which is filled with Beaux Arts and Queen Anne-style 19th-century row houses. — dnainfo.com

Danish firms JAJA Architects and ONV Architects, in collaboration with Bascon and Scandi Byg, have won the fourth delivery of the affordable housing concept AlmenBolig+. The order comprises 300-400 housing units on sites in the greater Copenhagen area. — bustler.net

The Denver Architectural League recently announced the winners of their Micro Housing Ideas Competition as well as seven formal recognitions. Inspired by a concern about the lack of innovation in Denver's existing multi-family housing market where many banal apartment, townhome and condo complexes continue to be built, this competition offered designers an opportunity to engage in reinventing the notion of "responsible affordable housing" with an emphasis on regenerative design. — bustler.net