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The UK’s Architects Registration Board (ARB) has found a British architect guilty of unacceptable professional conduct after the architect made “a series of offensive and antisemitic comments and gestures.” The architect, Justin Rooney, was also found guilty of making “a series of... View full entry
An NCARB/NOMA investigation has found that people of color, especially African Americans, are more likely to report issues with their architecture firm’s culture. The Firm Culture & Career Development Report is the latest analysis articulating the results of the joint NCARB/NOMA Baseline on... View full entry
What started as a self-funded project from New York-based architect Adam Paul Susaneck is gaining attention over its unique ability to paint a picture of the effects of racial segregation in the 180 American cities included in the controversial Federal Highway Act of 1956. Inspired by... View full entry
Weeks before its next Director steps into office, another faculty at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture has fallen into scandal after The Guardian recently leaked new accusations of bullying and harassment from within the School of Sustainable Construction. A group of nine school... View full entry
On July 26th, voting closes for the election of the next RIBA president. When the winner commences their two-year term as president on September 1st, 2023, they will be confronted with a list of burning issues across the UK’s architectural profession; and will be expected to publicly lead a... View full entry
Seventy years after one of the darkest chapters in Canadian LGBTQ history began, the Government of Canada has taken steps toward reconciliation and remembrance with a slate of just-announced new proposals for what will one day become the LGBTQ2+ National Monument in Ottawa. By locating it in the... View full entry
UC Berkeley Professor Nezar AlSayyad has been suspended for three years without pay for engaging in a pattern of sexual harassment and abuse of faculty power, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. AlSayyad, a tenured architecture professor and Middle East scholar, sexually harassed his former... View full entry
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the most important decision on fair housing in a generation. He’ll almost certainly get to see it overturned in his lifetime.
When Kennedy announced his long-rumored retirement on Wednesday, he shined a spotlight on the tenuous political balance of the U.S. Supreme Court. Famously a swing vote, Kennedy sided with the court’s four liberal justices on defining decisions on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and other hot-button social issues.
— City Lab
The "disparate impact" ruling of the Fair Housing Act is now being reconsidered by HUD. This could lead to the department repealing altogether, despite the fact that the Supreme Court already affirmed its constitutionality. Justice Kennedy's legacy of further integrating society is vulnerable to... View full entry
A real estate developer in Hawaii is under scrutiny for its plans to build a residential high-rise that has two separate entrances: one for high-income residents and another for low-income earners.
[...] will include 78 affordable rental units for people earning 80 percent or less of the area median income, as required by Honolulu’s affordable housing strategy. The other 351 units will be market-priced condominiums. If things go as ProsPac plans, the units will be separated with two entrances.
— huffingtonpost.com
Various examples of so-called "poor doors" in New York City, London, and Vancouver made the headlines in previous years, sparking heated debate across a number of Archinect comment sections. View full entry
[Airbnb] says it will spend the next several months reviewing how hosts and guests interact on the site and what it could do to ensure users are treated more fairly. [...]
"The bottom line is that the design of platforms dictates the decisions that people make on them. Even if there’s implicit bias, [Airbnb has] an enormous amount of ability to change the extent of discrimination on the platform."
— washingtonpost.com
For more on the controversial P2P renting service:Airbnb invests in a blockchain futureYou may have Airbnb to thank for that low hotel rateAirbnb intentionally misconstrued data to "garner good press", according to new reportAirbnb rentals cut deep into San Francisco housing stock, report... View full entry
A first-in-the-nation complex to be built in Hollywood would house about 200 LGBT seniors and young adults on the same campus.
Lorrie Jean, CEO of the the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which is building the $100 million complex, calls the two generation groups "the two most vulnerable parts of our community."
— scpr.org
Related stories in the Archinect news:As "gayborhoods" gentrify, LGBTQ people move into conservative AmericaHomes of the homeless, seized: L.A. cracks down on free housingToilets for everyone: the politics of inclusive design View full entry
The separate entrances for the rich and poor came about due to a loophole in the Inclusionary Housing program enacted in 2009 that allowed developers to get subsidies if they provided affordable housing either on or off-site. — theguardian.com
Last year, a luxury NYC high-rise had its request for separate entrances – one for its affordable housing-unit tenants, another for its market-rate tenants – approved, fanning the fires of discriminatory design debates here on Archinect. Now, the loophole in a NY-rent stabilization law that... View full entry
"Of course these so-called 'poor doors' are shocking, but they are a symptom, not the problem," says Michael Edwards, senior lecturer at the Bartlett school of planning at UCL. "We've simply stopped building proper social housing, and until that's addressed then fiddling around with front-door arrangements is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." — theguardian.com
Previously: Tale of Two Cities: NYC approves ‘poor door’ for luxury high-rise View full entry
New York City is moving forward with a proposal that calls for a new high-rise apartment complex to feature separate doors for wealthy tenants and those living in the building’s affordable housing unit.
While wealthy residents will be able to enter the building from its designated front entrance, affordable housing tenants will be required to go in through a back alley.
A mandatory affordable housing plan is not license to segregate lower-income tenants from those who are well-off.
— RT
Maybe the higher-ups will employ the low-income folk as maids and janitors? Built-in servants quarters, subsidized by the city. View full entry
Not long ago, these questions — of policy but also political and ethical questions — seemed to be out there on institutional tables, demanding discussion. Technically, they may be there still, but museums seem to be most interested in talking about real estate, assiduously courting oligarchs for collections, and anxiously scouting for the next “Rain Room.” Political questions, about which cultures get represented in museums and who gets to make the decisions, and how, are buried. — nytimes.com
And on the subject of integration, why, in one of the most ethnically diverse cities, does the art world continue to be a bastion of whiteness? Why are African-American curators and administrators, and especially directors, all but absent from our big museums? Why are there still so few black... View full entry
