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

Despite its distance from the center of New York City, Co-op City’s site and scale make it prominent on the landscape [...]. Critics, historians, and even the Supreme Court have noticed as well, weighing in since construction began in 1966 on what the complex signifies for housing finance, site planning, cooperative ownership, ethnic and racial diversity, and tenants’ rights. [...] But it is far from prototypical. — urbanomnibus.net

Berlin voters on Sunday decided leisure comes first and blocked plans to develop a big part of the former Tempelhof airport, the hub of the historic 1948-49 Berlin Airlift. [...]

Official results based on more than four-fifths of ballots cast showed that over half of voters backed a referendum to preserve the airport as a leisure space. City officials had wanted to use about a third of the land for housing because of Berlin's growing population. — therepublic.com

Tokyo’s extreme housing production and resulting market is a product of Japan’s uniquely liberal zoning rules. Taken along with its dense network of profitable, private railways, Tokyo is the closest thing this planet has to a city that has completely surrendered itself to market forces. And its construction numbers show it. — nextcity.org

Imagine what [living in a tiny house] might mean when it's time to bring a date back to your place for the first time. Or even worse, moving in together. Will you remain devoted to your extra-small space when you decide to get a dog? Have kids? And so on. [...]

Turns out, dating and cohabitating and raising a family in 120 to 400 square-foot spaces can be done. It just comes with a unique set of challenges and best-practices at each milestone. — citylab.com

Four projects -- which all happen to be built in California -- have won in the 2014 AIA/HUD Secretary Awards, as announced by the AIA Housing and Custom Residential Knowledge Community along with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The annual awards program recognizes what they deem as the best examples of the latest innovation and development in the housing design industry. — bustler.net

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

MIT Prof. Mark Jarzombek on the notion of primitive, the worldwide evolution of the housing, and the fate of the native populations in the modern environment

When does the architecture begin? How the pit house can explain the global migrations and links between the Navahos and first men in Europe? MIT Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture Mark Jarzombek clarifies the essence of the problem. — serious-science.org

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