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Brooks + Scarpa has released images of their recently-completed Rose Apartments complex, a community housing initiative for formerly homeless teenage youths transitioning into adulthood in Venice, Los Angeles. The 20,900-square-foot, four-story design includes some 35 units of highly affordable... View full entry
31-year-old entrepreneur Fanyu Lin has initiated a new philanthropic enterprise called the World Home Foundation, an effort focused on providing homes to undeserved populations that include low income urban citizens, migrants, and refugees. The new endeavor addresses a common... View full entry
As a result of reduced tax revenue from the 2017 corporate tax cuts enacted by President Donald Trump, the development of at least 15,000 affordable housing units has been either delayed or eliminated entirely, The Sacramento Bee reports. The reason? A significant portion of affordable... View full entry
Last year, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn, found out that their landlord was planning to replace the key fob entry system with facial recognition technology. [...]
But some residents were immediately alarmed by the prospect: They felt the landlord’s promise of added security was murky at best, and didn’t outweigh their concerns about having to surrender sensitive biometric information to enter their own homes.
— CityLab
"Housing complexes of low-income residents may be one early testing ground for residential applications of facial recognition technology," writes Tanvi Misra for CityLab. "But they’re not the only ones. Amazon’s doorbell company, Ring, is coming out with a video doorbell that incorporates... View full entry
[...] medium- and low-income residents can’t afford land, while the city’s wealth explodes and attracts economic activity that doesn’t keep its poor residents in the loop. This was the Hong Kong Greco wanted to show.
“Perhaps one should adopt a special lens in looking at Hong Kong, not only to see its superficial beauty, but also the social undercurrents that sustain its structures,” writes Dr. Ernest Chui in Greco’s book.
— CityLab
CityLab editorial fellow Karim Doumar presents the stunning black/white Polaroid shots from Swiss photographer and filmmaker Pascal Greco's new book, Hong Kong - Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies, documenting the gritty housing environments of Hong Kong's population at the lower end of the... View full entry
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward in 2005, Brad Pitt set up the Make It Right Foundation to aid in the rebuilding efforts. The non-profit charity, promoting energy efficient technology and high quality architecture, promised LEED Platinum-certified... View full entry
It's been merely a month since rapper/entrepreneur/design aficionado Kanye West announced on Twitter that he would launch an architecture venture with his design firm, to be called YEEZY Home, and now first renderings have appeared on Instagram that list West among the designers. "Low income... View full entry
Stacker was one of 188,000 people who applied for 20,000 spots in the voucher waiting line for the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles. And that line won’t be moving quickly. The Housing Authority’s Section 8 director, Carlos VanNatter, said only about 200 vouchers become available here every month, basically when a pay raise makes someone ineligible or someone dies. — marketplace.org
While the national average wait time for Section 8 vouchers is currently more than two years (with nearly half of all housing authorities having closed their lists to new applicants), the situation in big cities like New York and Los Angeles is so dire that residents have to apply for a coveted... View full entry
The number of apartments deemed affordable for very low-income families across the United States fell by more than 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.
The report by the government-backed mortgage financier is the first to compare rent increases in specific units over time. It examined loans that the corporation had financed twice between 2010 and 2016, allowing a comparison of the exact same rental units and how their affordability changed.
— The Washington Post
The Washington Post reports about a new report by Freddie Mac: "More renters flooded the market after people lost their homes in the housing crisis. The apartment vacancy rate was 8 percent in 2009, compared to 4 percent in 2017. That trend, coupled with a stagnant supply of apartments, resulted... View full entry
Residents of the outer suburbs tend to travel much longer distances between home, work and the services they need daily. Getting around necessarily defaults to the car, which has serious long-term implications for health. Driving is particularly associated with extended sitting in a confined space and, as a result, not getting enough exercise each day.
When poorer communities are located in areas of lesser amenity due to lower housing costs, this exacerbates their health problems.
— Economist Times
The close correlation between socioeconomic status and health has long been out of question. The built environment and the environmental context serve as direct social determinants of health. Due to lower housing costs, poorer communities are often restricted to residing in areas of lesser... 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
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
While President Trump talks repeatedly about fixing America’s inner cities, it’s a good bet that in the coming years, New York and other large metropolitan areas will need to be more self-reliant in solving pressing problems, especially low-income housing. [...]
Fortunately, there’s an already tested alternative: an annual luxury housing tax, levied on new high-end condos and rentals, which would feed a self-sustaining fund dedicated to develop truly affordable units.
— New York Times Op-Ed by Eric Uhlfelder
Fifty-two stories, four visually distinct sections, and one playful, gaping hole constitute the major components of Gensler's proposed new 300+ unit residential building for downtown Los Angeles, which would rise from the ashes of a (soon-to-be) former auto dealership on 1600 South Figueroa... View full entry
Forming a closer, more harmonious bond between humanity and nature is the underlying goal of Javier Senosiain's organic or so-called "bio-architecture." His buildings often take the shape of organic forms--in one case, mythic serpent Quetzalcoatl--while simultaneously harvesting rainwater and... View full entry
