A newly completed 125 ft high mural painted by Stik on a condemned council owned tower block in Acton, West London is the tallest street artwork in the UK.

The artwork depicts a mother and child looking forlornly from their condemned council block at the luxury apartment complexes being built around them. [...]

Charles Hocking House was built for low income families in 1967 and is earmarked to be torn down in 2016. — streetartnews.net

The John and Jill Ker Conway Residence is a 124-unit apartment building designed by Sorg Architects. The $33 million building is a striking stack of white, metal-paneled blocks, staggered with views facing the Capitol and the Mall. What makes the building truly distinctive, though, is that the space enables case managers and social workers to work onsite with veterans in tandem with the D.C. VA Medical Center.

Sixty units will be set aside permanently for homeless veterans [...]. — citylab.com

The city’s board of supervisors voted to legalize and regulate short-term stays through a controversial piece of legislation that has been two years in the making [...]

The key changes include a limit on non-hosted rentals for up to 90 days per year. [...]

[The hosts will] also have to pay the city’s hotel taxes. They — not Airbnb — are responsible for certifying that they’re only hosting 90 days a year and for keeping records that prove this. — techcrunch.com

The top five floors abruptly cantilever. Some neighbors say it looks like a prison. An “arty fortress,” was New York Magazine’s phrase.

I like the building’s exterior. Most people I’ve quizzed on the street during a half-dozen visits to the area turn out to like it, too. — New York Times

Charles Chawalko, a recent graduate of Parsons’ Design & Urban Ecologies program, is a resident of Southbridge Towers, a 1,651-unit development that remains in the program. But as he explains below, his cooperative is in the midst of a decision over whether it will join the majority of Mitchell-Lama buildings and leave. To residents of Southbridge Towers, the vote over whether to opt out of Mitchell-Lama transcends the citywide conversation on affordable housing [...]. — urbanomnibus.net

9 x 18. In square feet, that’s 162, smaller than the most micro micro-apartment.

It is the size of a typical parking space. That lowly slice of asphalt has prompted three young architects — Miriam Peterson, Sagi Golan and Nathan Rich, fellows at the Institute for Public Architecture — to come up with what could be an innovative way to ease the housing crisis. — nytimes.com

Melbourne is now a more expensive place to live than New York. The increasing cost of living, and in particular, the cost of housing risks seriously undermining the city’s liveability.

Plan Melbourne, the new metropolitan strategy for the city, recognises that housing affordability is one of the pressing issues facing Melburnians. The strategy offers a set of concepts aimed at shaping the city’s future and – the government hopes – addressing housing affordability and choice. — thisbigcity.net

We cannot rely on visionaries and authoritarians to generate more, and better, housing. They might deliver, with enormous risk and perseverance, through personal connections and their willingness to invest their own equity or to defer their developers’ fee, as BHC has done. But visionaries and authoritarians are few and far between. Rather, we need to formalize ways of rethinking and requantifying net-to-gross, studio-to-three-bedrooms, block-and-plank formulas. — urbanomnibus.net

Public housing in the United States is associated with failure and misery. The very words conjure up visions of concrete tower blocks, drug-related violence and concentrated poverty. But contrary to popular belief, public housing in the U.S. has not been an utter disaster [...].

Many of public housing’s failures can be traced to the American political and economic context, especially easy to see when compared with the success of similar policies around the world. — nextcity.org

Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]

The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range." — la.curbed.com