Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘affordable housing’

3-D Printed Houses

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 7, 2023| 6 Comments »

Photo: MJ Gautrau/ University of Maine.
BioHome3D, the first 3D-printed home made entirely of organic, renewable materials, was unveiled on Nov. 21 at the University of Maine’s Orono campus.

I wonder if writer Laura Graves, blogging from what she calls the Hinterlands of Central Maine, has heard about this initiative in her state. It actually looks like a good idea for any state (or nation). See what you think.

Maya Homan writes at the Boston Globe, “How do you create lots of affordable housing with limited materials, labor, and other resources? One group of researchers at the University of Maine has come up with a proposed solution: hook up a 3D printer.

“The United States faces rising rents and housing shortages, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, but Maine has its own unique, overlapping challenges: The state needs another estimated 20,000 homes to meet the current demand for low-income housing. It also has the oldest average population in the nation, with a median age of 44.7, an issue that exacerbates the state’s labor shortage. With pandemic-related supply chain issues and rising costs of raw materials, the already-expensive housing market has surged.

“Enter BioHome3D, the first 3D-printed home made entirely of organic, renewable materials.

“The prototype, which was created by the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center, has been in the works for three years, according to founding director Habib Dagher. It is 600 square feet in total, with a modern, unvaulted barrel roof, and a wide front porch with white shiplap exterior walls. The interior contains an open-concept kitchen, living, and dining area with grooved wooden walls and tall windows. The single bedroom doubles as an office, and a tiled bathroom completes the space.

“The materials used to manufacture the 3D-printed home also help address another issue in Maine: the shuttering of several pulp and paper mills that once processed residual sawdust and other byproducts from local sawmills. …

“Dagher said, ‘We asked ourselves, could we print a home with that material?’ The answer, thus far, has been yes.

“The prototype, which was unveiled Nov. 21 at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, is now undergoing tests to see how the building fares during Maine’s harsh winters. …

“Dagher’s lab is building on over two decades of research into using biomaterials to create sound structures. Though Dagher’s lab is not the first to 3D print a house, they are the first to use a 3D printer to create the entirety of the structure, as well as the first to use environmentally friendly and reusable materials.

“ ‘The walls, the floor, the roof are all bio-based, and it’s 100 percent recyclable,’ Dagher said. …

“While there are certain drawbacks to using engineered materials over natural ones — fire safety being one — Dagher said the homes have displayed an added durability throughout different climates, as well as increased resistance to termites. …

“The homes are designed using modular construction, meaning that individual rooms are manufactured indoors and driven to the construction site, where they can be quickly assembled. Dagher hopes that this method will help cut down on construction time, as builders will not be as impacted by weather conditions.

“As the project is still in the testing phase, there aren’t yet definitive estimates for how many people will be needed to construct the homes, or how much each tiny house will cost to manufacture. However, Dagher said the use of sustainable materials and the ability to 3D print the structure ‘really changes the game in terms of how we think of housing content and how we think of construction.’

“Though the research process is far from over, ‘we’ve learned a lot,’ he said. ‘We’ve learned what not to do, as well as what to do, and the learning has not ended.’

“The lab’s next steps are to build a manufacturing plant (which Dagher affectionately nicknamed the ‘factory of the future’) to be able to produce the homes en masse. Once the factory is up and running, they hope to be able to 3D print a home within 48 hours, and move on to larger projects like housing developments.

“ ‘There’s a lot of potential, not only to solve a crisis in Maine, but to assist in a solution to the housing crisis nationally as well,’ he said.”

More at the Globe, here. See also my 2018 post on a different kind of 3-D house in the Netherlands, here.

Read Full Post »

Posh Locale for Affordable Housing?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 18, 2022| 4 Comments »

Photo: Jean-Christophe Quinton Architecte. Illustration: Stephanie Davidson.
“At street level,” CityLab reports, “12 Rue Jean-Bart blends into its neighborhood. At the top, things get a little funky.” 

Blogger Laurie and I exchanged comments the other day about how neighbors with decent housing too often vote against building affordable housing nearby. True, even though we all know that forcing families into homelessness hurts us all.

A recent story about Paris, where the neighbors didn’t get to vote, shows that good architecture can enable what the French call “social” housing to be constructed in the most exclusive neighborhoods.

Marie Patino and Kriston Capps write at CityLab, “The project at 12 Rue Jean-Bart is a modest one, just eight units of affordable housing on a narrow lot in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens. The social housing project nevertheless caused a stir with neighbors in the 6th arrondissement, one of the city’s more affluent areas.

“When local politicians backing the project came to visit the building during its construction, neighbors shouted from windows across the street that it was a shame to build social housing here, according to Jean-Christophe Quinton, the Paris-based architect who designed the small in-fill development.

“Local resistance was a persistent feature of the project throughout its three-year-long construction, Quinton says; the building regularly faced harsh scrutiny in local newspaper Le Parisien.

“Quinton responded to critics with design. The final building that emerged at 12 Rue Jean-Bart is striking: Its facade features great concave swoops of limestone, like ribbons of frosting atop a particularly elegant slab of cake. Yet in many ways, it’s a traditional project. The architect strived to make the building familiar: It’s finished with the same materials found throughout Paris and built to the same proportions as some of the 19th-century buildings on the street.

“ ‘We need to destigmatize social housing,’ Quinton told Bloomberg CityLab from his Paris design studio, his Zoom background cluttered with building models. ‘That’s also why it’s made out of stone, because it’s totally integrated into the city, to say that you can build social housing in Paris, and that’s a good thing.’

“Quinton says he’s learned that there’s no use trying to compete with the street in Paris, so 12 Rue Jean-Bart does its best to fit in amongst its neighbors, in a way that makes it almost invisible from afar. The design’s most dramatic gestures are reserved for the upper floors. At street level, the building’s curves look almost like classical fluted columns. Twin weight-bearing stone culs de lampe on each side of the front entrance, which support the corners of the building where the curves meet, are hidden feats of engineering. …

“Other details are traditional, too, and as typical of Paris architecture as possible. The white balconies and joinery at 12 Rue Jean-Bart are common in the city. So is the honey limestone, which comes from a quarry in Vassens, not far from the city. The scale of the project is simply driven by local building codes. The setbacks at the top of the building match those built during the mid-19th century. …

“For residents at 12 Rue Jean-Bart, the experience is rather dramatic. The building is narrower at the back than at street level, and each floor fans out from a central staircase column. The layouts of the upper-floor units with balconies shift dramatically from those below in order to maximize light while adhering to strict accessibility standards required by Paris codes — a challenge, given the limited size of the lot. The balconies provide a rhythmic frame for the street.

“The building’s been fully rented for almost a year now. The residents love it, according to the architect. And the neighbors have learned to live with it.

“ ‘From afar, you don’t see it, and up close, it has personality,’ Quinton says. ‘It’s a Parisian personality.’ ”

More at CityLab, here. No firewall.

Fellow bloggers who visit Paris: If you are ever in Rue Jean-Bart, do send us a picture of number 12.

Read Full Post »

Land Trusts and Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 22, 2022| 7 Comments »

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/CSM.
Meidan “Abby” Lin poses in her apartment in Boston’s Chinatown. She and her husband bought the unit with help from the Chinatown Community Land Trust, which aims to stabilize the community through affordable housing, ownership of land, control of public lands like parks, and the preservation of cultural and historical sites.

One of the biggest challenges for America in these times is housing. Housing can help people with addictions get clean. It can reduce the need for long, polluting commutes to jobs in expensive urban areas, it can give people breathing space to pursue their interests and make better lives for their children.

One of the current experiments in providing housing that people can afford involves community land trusts.

Jocelyn Yang and Alexander Thompson write at the Christian Science Monitor, ‘In March 2016, [Meidan ‘Abby’] Lin; her husband, Yin Zheng; their young son, Yuchen; and Mr. Zheng’s mother left Fuzhou, Chin, … for another port half a world away on the Charles River in Boston.

“They shared their first apartment in Boston’s Chinatown with another family. During nights in that cramped space, Ms. Lin started dreaming of a place she could call her own. But Boston’s soaring real estate prices seemed to put that dream out of reach. Mr. Zheng works at a restaurant. Ms. Lin works at home.

“Then a friend told Ms. Lin about the Chinatown Community Land Trust. … The group was selling apartments at discount prices, and Ms. Lin jumped on the waitlist. But there was only one apartment big enough for her family. ‘I didn’t think we were able to get it,’ she says. All she could do was hope.

“Community land trusts [are] buying their own properties to preserve them as affordable housing in perpetuity and give residents more say over what happens in quickly changing neighborhoods. 

“That mission has gained new urgency over the past year as homeowners reap the rewards of a red-hot real estate market while renters are hit with steep rent hikes, deepening the divide between the housing haves and have-nots. …

“ ‘As neighborhoods change and gentrify really fast, the idea of having community control and having more say about how neighborhoods are changing and who’s going to be able to live in the neighborhood over time, from an affordability perspective, I think becomes really important,’ says Beth Sorce, who works with community land trusts nationwide at the Grounded Solutions Network, an affordable housing advocacy group. …

“Land trusts raise money from donations, grants, and government funds to buy property. Then they lease the house or apartment to a buyer well below market value, but the trust retains ownership of the land.

“This way, occupants typically get an ownership stake in their homes. They build equity over time, but at a rate that is often capped at 1% or 2% a year. The trust, which is governed democratically by residents and neighbors, can decide to whom the dwelling can be sold and at what price, usually through a covenant in the lease. This ensures the property remains affordable.

“The land trust idea was imported to the United States by civil rights activist Charles Sherrod in the early 1970s from the kibbutzim of Israel. Mr. Sherrod saw land trusts as a way for Black Americans to buy agricultural land in the South. …

“Andre Perry, a housing policy expert at the Brookings Institution [has shown] that an ‘intrinsic value of whiteness’ persists at almost every step of home buying from the appraisal to the sale. Minorities, but especially Black people, must pay more and get less. 

“By taking property out of the traditional market, land trusts reduce the discrimination baked into that system and empower communities to actively fight it, Dr. Perry says. …

“In California, justice is what drives Jacqueline Rivera and her fellow housing activists in San Jose. In the heart of Silicon Valley, where even high-paid tech employees struggle to find housing, development was pushing out vibrant Black, Hispanic, and immigrant neighborhoods.

“In community conversations Ms. Rivera and her colleagues held around the city in 2018, land trusts kept coming up. Ms. Rivera grabbed hold of the idea, and by 2020 she was heading up the South Bay Community Land Trust.

“Success has not come easily, though.  By definition, land trusts do not make profits, and fundraising is the biggest challenge they face. To buy their first property, a fourplex in downtown San Jose, they need to fundraise at least $1 million, on top of the half million dollars they need to pay professional staff and make the organization run. Speed is a problem, too. Developers snap up properties with cash in a matter of days, while the land trust moves ‘at the pace of community,’ Ms. Rivera says. 

“Yet, in order to disrupt traditional real estate, land trusts ‘still have to play in the real estate game,’ she adds.

“Advocates stress that land trusts are just one tool in a broader approach to the affordability crisis, but it could be a more effective one with government help. Ms. Sorce, of Grounded Solutions, says state and local governments should invest money in land trusts and change appraisal policies so land trust properties aren’t paying taxes based on their speculative value. With or without such help, land trusts must innovate to succeed.

“ ‘When we think about community land trusts, so many times we think about just the homeownership level,’ says Sheldon Clark, who recently served as president of the board of the Douglass Community Land Trust in Washington, D.C. ‘And that really just doesn’t cover the housing needs that we have.’

“Douglass has units it’s maintaining as permanently affordable rentals and other properties set up as cooperatives. They’ve also helped tenants take advantage of a District of Columbia law that entitles them to buy their unit if their landlord plans to sell.

“Really, land trust leaders say, homeownership is just one aspect of their focus on what Mr. Clark calls the ‘big C’ in community land trusts: the community.

“Douglass organized food drives during the pandemic and helps connect residents to credit unions, as many are unbanked. In Boston’s Chinatown, the land trust helped save a local park.”

Find other examples of how land trusts strengthen communities at the Monitor, here. No firewall; nice photos.

Read Full Post »

A Bequest of Affordable Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 28, 2021| 5 Comments »

Photo: David L Ryan/ Globe Staff.
Homeowner Paul E. Fallon hopes to inspire others to bequeath their homes to an affordable-housing nonprofit that will help moderate-income families in Cambridge, Mass., to build wealth through homeownership.

As much as I believe that lack of homeownership is a major cause of inequality, keeping many lower-income families from passing on their nest egg to another generation, I could never bring myself to do what Paul E. Fallon recently committed himself to doing. He’s really putting his money where his mouth is. And his children are amazingly supportive.

As Jon Gorey reported for the Boston Globe, “When Paul E. Fallon purchased a Victorian four-family in Cambridge nearly 30 years ago, he wasn’t angling to become a minor real estate tycoon. But he wanted to raise his children in the city, and a single-family home was, even then, more than he could afford. ‘I bought it when a four-family house in Cambridge was a pariah because it was under rent control,’ Fallon said. ‘There was no crystal ball in 1992 that told me this house was going to make me rich.’

“But it did. Fallon lived in one unit and rented out the others, first under rent control, then at fair market rents. Now a single man in his mid-60s, the writer and retired architect owns his property outright. … In just one generation, his home in what had long been a middle-class neighborhood of plumbers and electricians has become a multimillion-dollar asset.

“That makes Fallon uncomfortable as he sees young families, especially people of color, unable to plant the kind of roots in Cambridge he did. His own children, despite being well-launched in good careers, he said, could never afford to buy the house they grew up in now. ‘Cambridge’s vanishing middle class makes my city a less diverse, less dynamic place to live’ he said.

“So when he turned 65 last year, … Fallon realized he wanted to do something very different with his property. He decided to leave his house to a local nonprofit when he dies. The goal is to create not just affordable housing, but long-term generational homeownership opportunities for four Cambridge households. …

‘I don’t just want to give people a secure place to live; I want to give the opportunity for people to be in the middle class, to accrue equity, to be able to pass the house down to their own children if they want to … to really build wealth.’

” ‘The difference between the haves and have-nots in the United States is largely a matter of who owns their house,’ Fallon added. … ‘I feel like if we’re going to be serious about creating a more equitable world, then those of us who have more than we need have to spread our wealth. We can’t just talk about it.’ …

“Fallon first wanted to make sure his two adult children were on board with his idea, even though it meant they would be losing out on a significant portion of their inheritance. But that, too, was part of his plan. ‘My house is worth so much money that, if my children inherited it, they would be living on Easy Street. And I’ve never met anyone who inherited wealth that wasn’t changed for the worse as a result,’ Fallon said. Gratefully, his kids understood where he was coming from. ‘They’ve spent their whole lives around me — they were not surprised,’ he said.

“He then sent letters to eight Cambridge nonprofits explaining his still-nebulous idea in vague terms — big on concept, short on logistics. After interviewing a handful of them, Fallon landed on Just-A-Start, a 53-year-old Cambridge organization that develops and manages affordable housing and offers youth programs, job training, and other economic advancement services.

“ ‘Just-A-Start really got it,’ Fallon said. Their goals aligned with his, and he felt confident they would still be around when the time comes to implement his vision. ‘They understood that what I’m trying to do is to help Cambridge be a more diverse place, a more equitable place,’ he said. …

“When Just-A-Start executive director Carl Nagy-Koechlin received the inquiry, he recognized Fallon’s name; they had worked together on an affordable housing development in Somerville a few years prior. He also realized that Fallon’s explicit instructions — that the house be used for homeownership opportunities — would help fill a key gap in the city’s affordable housing stock. ‘Most of the housing we’ve developed is rental housing, and that’s because it’s needed — but also because the financing sources for affordable housing are skewed in that direction,’ he said. …

“Fallon and Nagy-Koechlin spent a few months hammering out the details into a memorandum of understanding, which Fallon then brought to [Gregory Pearce, the Cambridge lawyer who assisted Fallon with his estate plan] to review. ‘All the heavy lifting was done before it got to me,’ Pearce said. ‘All I really had to do was to make sure that the plan is actually going to happen upon Paul’s death.’ That meant establishing an estate plan and selecting a reliable trustee to make sure Fallon’s wishes are faithfully carried out.”

Read the details about how this is going to work, here.

Read Full Post »

New Life for Dead Malls

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 28, 2020| 6 Comments »

Image: Brookfield Properties Inc. 
Developers are converting part of the 41-year-old Alderwood Mall outside of Seattle into housing.

Looking back, don’t you feel like you always knew malls would go the way of the Dodo as soon as online shopping started taking hold? I had no idea, but now I imagine I was ahead of the curve. I wonder how many people in the 1990s were already pondering what to do with empty mall real estate in future decades.

There will probably always be a need for someplace like a mall for people to gather with friends and maybe have an indoor walk when the weather is bad. Maybe retail shops for people who’d rather see items up close — or try them on before buying — will survive, but they’ll never fill all that space.

In today’s article, we learn about a conversion effort at a mall in Washington State.

In June, Patrick Sisson wrote at Bloomberg’s City Lab, “The multiple crises impacting the U.S. economy — the botched response to the coronavirus and the resulting economic fallout, and lack of spending power — have delivered a new gut punch to brick-and-mortar retail, a sector that was already reeling.

“More than half of all U.S. department stores in malls will be gone by 2021, one real estate research firm predicts, and surviving retailers may not be far behind; once-mighty brands such as Cheesecake Factory and the Gap are skipping rent payments, Starbucks is closing physical locations, and developers see a future for big box stores as office complexes. …

“At the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, a suburb north of Seattle, an adaptive reuse project already in progress suggests that America’s vast stock of fading shopping infrastructure could indeed get a second life as places to live. …

“Developers are turning a wide swath of the 41-year-old shopping center into Avalon Alderwood Place, a 300-unit apartment complex with underground parking. The project won’t completely erase the shopping side of the development: Commercial tenants will still take up 90,000 square feet of retail. But when the new Alderwood reopens, which developers expect will happen by 2022, the focus will have shifted dramatically. …

“Lynnwood may offer an ideal testing ground for the long-term opportunities in large-scale suburban mall-to-housing conversion. The suburb of roughly 40,000 people is a commuter bedroom community for Seattle, which has been struggling mightily with a severe housing shortage. …

“ ‘There have been some great examples of this kind of redevelopment, such as Tyson’s Corner in Virginia, but it’s very specific to individual cases, and very expensive,’ says Nick Egelanian, president of retail consultancy SiteWorks, who predicts up to a third of malls will be vacant due to the economic fallout from the pandemic. ‘If it’s a good location, you can backfill that with residential, hotel, office and entertainment.’ …

“Brian Lake, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation who focuses on housing issues, believes that, minus the hurdles put up by zoning regulations and red tape, such commercial conversions should be happening everywhere. From a construction standpoint, conversions are simple.

‘We need to open up every opportunity possible to develop new affordable housing,’ he says. ‘Fannie Mae estimated we need an additional 2.5 million units just to satisfy the long-term demand, and that’s before this year’s crises.’

“Converting commercial real estate to housing may be the best use of land in such an over-retailed country. Big shopping centers tend to be centrally located and connected to transit. … During a time of housing shortages, Lake believes that transforming empty commercial buildings is a ‘moral imperative.’

“The Alderwood redevelopment brings challenges. … So the city is working on a housing action plan to make sure social services and education arrive in the community, not just new apartments. The mall may be evolving, but the desire, and challenges, in creating a community-oriented development still remain.

“ ‘You can have acres and acres of housing, but without a community, is it a place?’ [David Kleitsch, the city’s economic development director,] says. ‘Does it fulfill somebody’s experience?’ ”

More at City Lab, here.

Read Full Post »

A Prize for Affordable Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »

3203

Photo: Tim Crocker/RIBA/PA
The Goldsmith Street project in Norwich marks the first time the UK’s Stirling architecture prize has gone to affordable housing.

I’m looking at pictures of a handsome affordable-housing project in England and remembering that during my short stint at Rhode Island Housing, a similar building, restored to provide affordable housing for homeless veterans, also won a prize. I blogged about interviewing one happy resident here. Clearly, homes for low-income people need not be ugly.

Oliver Wainwright reports at the Guardian, “One hundred years since the 1919 Addison Act paved the way for the country’s programme of mass council housing, the prize for the best new building in the UK has been awarded to one of the first new council housing projects in a generation.

“Goldsmith Street in Norwich represents what has become a rare breed: streets of terraced homes built directly by the council, rented with secure tenancies at fixed social rents. And it’s an architectural marvel, too.

“ ‘A modest masterpiece’ is how the RIBA [Royal Institute of British Architects] Stirling prize judges described the project, designed by London firm Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley, representing ‘high-quality architecture in its purest most environmentally and socially conscious form.’

“The 105 creamy-brick homes are designed to stringent Passivhaus environmental standards, meaning energy costs are around 70% cheaper than average. The walls are highly insulated and the roofs are cleverly angled at 15 degrees, to ensure each terrace doesn’t block sunlight from the homes behind, while letterboxes are built into external porches, rather than the front doors, to reduce any possibility of draughts.

“Immense thought has gone into every detail – from the perforated brick balconies to the cleverly interlocking staircases in the three-storey flats at the end of each terrace – to ensure that every home has its own front door on the street. The back gardens look on to a planted alley, dotted with communal tables and benches, while parking has been pushed to the edge of the site, freeing up the streets for people, not cars. …

The architects won the original competition because they were one of the few firms to propose streets, rather than slabs of apartment blocks.

“They took inspiration from the city’s Golden Triangle, a desirable neighbourhood of Victorian terraced houses, where the streets are laid out more tightly than modern overlooking regulations would allow. The architects used this precedent to argue that their new neighbourhood could be just as humanely scaled, while fitting in more homes.

“Marking the first time in the 23-year history of the Stirling prize that it has been awarded to social housing, the project beat stiff competition from the revamped London Bridge station, an opera house in a former stable block, the Macallan whisky distillery in Scotland, a visitor centre for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and a house made entirely of cork. …

“This year’s choice sends a clear message that, despite government cuts, it is eminently possible for brave councils to take the initiative and build proper social housing.”

Read more here.

Photo: Suzanne’s Mom
An impressive coalition of funders, including Rhode Island Housing, collaborated on this 2015 award-winning mill restoration to house homeless veterans.

030716-vets-for-tomorrow-providence

Read Full Post »

Combining the Arts with Affordable Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 16, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Elizabeth Hafalia, The Chronicle
Facing a need for affordable housing and arts space, San Francisco’s Mission Economic Development Agency is joining with Dance Mission Theater and the Mission Neighborhood Centers to repurpose this neglected 1919 building.

Have you ever visited San Francisco’s Mission District? A poor, immigrant neighborhood, it is nevertheless a vibrant experiment in people-oriented housing and support for food entrepreneurs and the arts. The creative energy there is tangible.

Moreover, the neighborhood’s community-development folks never stop turning dreams into reality. J.K. Dineen has an update at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“A historic but long-neglected commercial building at Mission and 18th streets in San Francisco is poised to be rejuvenated with a mix of affordable housing, child care and dance.

“The dilapidated 1919 structure, a former furniture store that was remodeled with an Art Deco flair in the late 1930s, has been on and off the market for more than a decade. …

“Finally the Mission Economic Development Agency, a politically powerful group that often opposes market-rate housing, reached a deal to buy it by collaborating with Dance Mission Theater and the Mission Neighborhood Centers, which will open a child care facility there.

“ ‘We are all going in together to do a new model of cooperative living and dancing and taking care of our children,’ said Krissy Keefer, executive director of Dance Mission Theater. ‘It’s going to be very communal.’ …

“Brokers with the San Francisco office of the realty firm Marcus & Millichap … said market-rate developers were scared off by the Mission’s anti-gentrification political environment and that ‘MEDA was very good to work with.’ …

“The building will be the group’s first home ownership project — the others are rentals — and the first targeting middle-income families rather than low-income folks. Mission Neighborhood Centers is providing some of the project funding, along with two nonprofits: Low Income Investment Fund, a financial intermediary that provides capital for community developments, and the Neighbor to Neighbor fund.”

I’m sure everyone has read about the housing crunch in San Francisco, with tech employees pushing prices up. It’s good to hear of anything designed to ease the shortage. More here.

Read Full Post »

How Ordinary People Are Reducing Crime

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »


Photo: Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
Noreen McClendon, executive director of Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, works to create affordable housing and job opportunities. A byproduct: crime reduction.

When people focus on getting “tough on crime,” crime can get worse. Emily Badger writes at the New York Times about research suggesting that people in communities where crime has gone way down since the 1990s “were working hard, with little credit, to address the problem themselves.

“Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate. That’s what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, argues in a new study and a forthcoming book. Mr. Sharkey doesn’t contend that community groups alone drove the national decline in crime, but rather that their impact is a major missing piece. …

“Between the early 1990s and 2015, the homicide rate in America fell by half. Rates of robbery, assault and theft tumbled in tandem. In New York, Washington and San Diego, murders dropped by more than 75 percent. Although violence has increased over the last two years in some cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, even those places remain safer than they were 25 years ago. …

“This long-term trend has fundamentally altered city life. It has transformed fear-inducing parks and subways into vibrant public spaces. It has lured wealthier whites back into cities. It has raised the life expectancies of black men. …

“The same communities were participating in another big shift that started in the 1990s: The number of nonprofits began to rise sharply across the country, particularly those addressing neighborhood and youth development. …

“Nonprofits were more likely to form in the communities with the gravest problems. But they also sprang up for reasons that had little to do with local crime trends, such as an expansion in philanthropic funding. …

“Comparing the growth of other kinds of nonprofits, the researchers believe they were able to identify the causal effect of these community groups. …

“The research also affirms some of the tenets of community policing: that neighborhoods are vital to policing themselves, and that they can address the complex roots of violence in ways that fall beyond traditional police work. …

“Many similar groups did not explicitly think of what they were doing as violence prevention. But in creating playgrounds, they enabled parents to better monitor their children. In connecting neighbors, they improved the capacity of residents to control their streets. In forming after-school programs, they offered alternatives to crime.

“In the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta, the crime rate in the mid 1990s was 18 times the national average. …

“ ‘We knew we wanted to see violence and crime go down in the community,’ said Carol Naughton, who led the foundation for years and today is the president of a national group, Purpose Built Communities, that is trying to teach East Lake’s model in other cities. ‘But we’ve never had a crime-prevention program.’

“Today violent crime in East Lake is down 90 percent from 1995.”

One and one and 50 make a million. As solutions to the world’s problems fail to come top-down, ordinary folks are leading the way. More here.

Read Full Post »

Granny Pods

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 29, 2017| 2 Comments »

Photo: Amelia Templeton/Oregon Public Broadcasting
The Granny Pods of Portland, Oregon, aren’t just for grannies. This woman and her family live in one — technically an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) — in their landlord’s backyard. Last year, Portland issued building permits for roughly one ADU a day, easing a housing crunch.

When I was a child, I used to hear a lot about zoning from my politically oriented mother — large lots were good, allowing  residential uses in commercial or industrial areas was bad. Times change. Some industrial areas are clean; mixed-use development improves community vitality; higher density in cities is good for keeping rents affordable.

Amelia Templeton reports for National Public Radio about recent initiatives in Oregon.

“Earlier this year, Michelle Labra got a notice that the rent on her family’s two-bedroom apartment was doubling, from around $620 a month to more than $1,300. She worried she was being priced out of Portland and would have to move to the suburbs.

“But Labra, her husband and their two children didn’t get pushed out of Cully, their North Portland neighborhood. They were able to stay by moving into a little house, 800 square feet, built in a neighbor’s backyard. It’s a type of housing city planners refer to as an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, often called a granny flat or granny pod. …

“With a lot of cities looking for solutions to rising housing prices, the idea of making it easier for homeowners to add small second units in their backyards and garages is gaining traction. Portland has among the fastest rising rents in the country, and it has embraced the ADU as a low cost way to create more housing in desirable neighborhoods. …

“Talking about the sudden rent increase [at her old home] brings Labra to tears. She was close to the other families in the apartment complex, and so were her children …

“The [apartment complex] was on the main street in Cully, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Portland with mobile home parks, ranch houses and small apartments built in the 1960s and 1970s.

“It’s also, according 2010 census data, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Oregon. Close to half of the people who live there are people of color.

“The residents of the Normandy started working with a community group called Living Cully and staged a protest against the rent increase. Hundreds of people marched in the streets back in February. …

“In an effort to arrest the gentrification of the neighborhood, Living Cully helped about half the families relocate to new homes in Cully. …

“Eli Spevak, a developer with the company Orange Splot, which builds smaller homes including ADUs … [says] Portland’s zoning code is contributing to its housing problems.

“On much of the city’s land, the code limits how many units you can build on a lot, so developers build the biggest house possible, to turn the most profit. There is an exception for ADUs as long as they meet certain criteria. …

” ‘The good thing about it from my perspective is they allow a neighborhood to have people with a wide range of incomes living with each other.’ ”

More here.

Read Full Post »

Teens Find Culinary Skills Beat Jail

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2016| 2 Comments »

Love this story by Leigh Vincola at EcoRI News.

“The Harvest Kitchen Project is one of the many arms of Farm Fresh Rhode Island that keeps local food circulating in our communities. The program takes area youth, ages 16-19, who are involved with juvenile corrections, and puts them to work making sauces, pickles and other preserves.

“The teenagers participate in a 20-week job-readiness program that prepares them for employment in the food industry. The program touches not only on kitchen skills but the on the many aspects of work in the culinary industry, from sales and customer service to local farm sourcing to teamwork and cooperation. …

“For the past several years, Harvest Kitchen has operated out of a commercial kitchen space in Pawtucket.”

But when Pawtucket Central Falls Development (PCF) “approached Farm Fresh with its rehabilitation plan for 2 Bayley St., a downtown [Pawtucket] multi-use building that would include affordable housing, retail space and job-training opportunities, the match seemed perfect.” More  at EcoRI, here.

I’ve been buying Harvest Kitchen’s applesauce at the Burnside Farmers Market, and I’m being completely honest when I say it’s the best applesauce I’ve had in years. That’s partly because I love chunks in my applesauce, but also because it’s sweet with no sugar added. If you return the empty jar, you get 25 cents back on the next jar.

Harvest Kitchen offers cranberry and strawberry applesauce, too. Other products include dried apple slices, peach slices in season, whole tomatoes, pickles with veggies, dilly beans and onion relish.

In addition to PCF, organizations that have helped to make this happen include Rhode Island Housing, RI Department of Children Youth and Families (Division of Juvenile Correction), Amgen Foundation, Fresh Sound Foundation, The Rhode Island Foundation and TriMix Foundation.

Find sales locations here.

Photo: FarmFreshRI

Read Full Post »

Give Us Your Tired … Houses

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2016| 1 Comment »

Here’s a creative way to address the urgent need for housing in this country: make a deal with Canada to take the houses it doesn’t want anymore.

Kirk Johnson has the story at the NY Times.

“In the San Juan Islands of northwest Washington State, where a severe shortage of affordable housing threatens the economy and the community, a small nonprofit group has found an unlikely way to help anchor families that are struggling to stay — by lifting up unloved houses in Canada, hoisting them onto barges and hauling them to where they are needed. …

“The structures had what builders call good bones, and the group, the San Juan Community HomeTrust, discovered that the cost of transporting them across the Haro Strait from Canada and restoring them here was comparable to the cost of building from scratch. …

“The number of people living in poverty in the county has risen about 17 percent since the end of the recession in 2009, according to census figures, even as the economic recovery in Washington and around the nation gained steam.

“ ‘It’s kind life or death to keep our working families here,’ said Peter Kilpatrick, the project manager in refitting the houses to be imported by the San Juan Community HomeTrust. When the rewiring, painting and structural repairs are finished in June, buyers who have already met income and residency requirements can take possession.

“Through a combination of donated land, government and foundation grants and local fund-raising, the homes will cost the buyers — a hospital worker, several teachers and a massage therapist among them — from $160,000 to $210,000. The median market price here was almost $500,000 at the end of last year.” More here.

Nothing like a little recycling ingenuity applied to a problem! In fact, I was just commenting to a blogger who’s teaching in El Salvador that the locals’ skill at repairing and reusing items is a great foundation for creative problem solving in general. (Please read Milford Street’s report from El Salvador, here.)

Nancy DeVaux
Houses from Canada were transported by barge to the San Juan Islands in Washington State, where affordable housing is badly needed.

Read Full Post »

Millennials Find Housing with Elderly

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 23, 2016| 2 Comments »

In Helsinki, Finland, where young people traditionally leave home at 18 but can no longer afford urban rents, Millennials are applying by the hundreds to live with the elderly.

According to Kae Lani Kennedy at Matador Network, “Retirement homes are serving as more than a community for the elderly. These facilities are providing affordable housing for the city’s growing population of homeless millennials.

“ ‘It’s almost like a dorm, but the people aren’t young. They’re old,’ explains Emil Bostrom, a participant in ‘A Home That Fits,’ a new housing project that allows millennials to move into retirement communities. Bostrom is a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher, and though he has a steady income, it is not enough to compete with 90,000 other renters in a city that has roughly 60,000 affordable rental properties. …

“Bostrom, along with many other young adults, can enjoy discounted rent in exchange for socializing with the seniors in their community. …

“By interacting with a younger generation, the elderly involved with ‘A Home That Fits’ have the opportunity to be engaged in an active and diverse community, instead of being left behind in a forgotten generation.” More here.

And check out a post I wrote about the same phenomenon in Cleveland, here. Both initiatives sound like fun to me.

Video: Seeker Stories

Read Full Post »

Fiber Optics Given to Public Housing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Here’s an idea that could give a welcome boost to underprivileged children: a free connection to the Internet at their home.

It seems that Google, in the spirit of its discontinued motto “Don’t be evil,” is piloting a new public service.

Matt Hamblen at Computerworld reports, “Google Fiber [recently] announced free gigabit Internet service to residents of selected public housing projects connected to its fiber optic service in U.S. cities.

“The program was launched at West Bluff, an affordable housing community in Kansas City, Mo., where 100 homes have been connected to Google Fiber. Across the Kansas City area, Google is now working with affordable housing providers to connect as many as nine properties that could reach more than 1,300 local families.

“Google described the program as an extension of its work with ConnectHome, an initiative of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Obama administration. …

“In addition to free Internet, eligible residents will work with ConnectHome partners like Connecting for Good and Surplus Exchange to be able to purchase discounted computers and learn new computer skills, Google said.” More here.

Depending on what the housing developments are like to live in and whether they provide supports like the Family Self-Sufficiency program to move people to independence, this could be a useful piece of the difficult poverty-reduction puzzle. So, good on Google!

Photo: ConnectHome 
A resident of West Bluff in Kansas City and her son are among the first of 1,300 families in area affordable housing units to receive Google Fiber gigabit Internet service at no cost.

Read Full Post »

Nice Homes from Shipping Containers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2015| 2 Comments »

This is not a story about creating housing for the homeless, although it could be. It’s about cutting some of the expense of construction by recycling maritime shipping containers. A company doing just that was featured in April in a NY Times interview that Vivian Marino conducted with Paul M. Galvin.

“Mr. Galvin, 52, is the chairman, chief executive and a founder of SG Blocks, a publicly traded company that repurposes maritime-grade steel cargo shipping containers into green building blocks for use in commercial, industrial and residential building construction. The containers are provided by ConGlobal Industries, a partner.”

Galvin says, “I had gotten into real estate development through a charity that I co-founded and was involved in running, and we were developing housing programs for individuals and families with AIDS. So we had to figure out a way to give them continuum care — we had to get good at real estate. And we started to develop affordable housing.

“If you’ve ever done any development in New York, you know that the construction process is not always as predictable as you would like, and so I saw this as a way to create a sustainable alternative in the marketplace and eliminate some of the risk of site-base construction. …

“We’re doing a restaurant today — Do you know Bareburger? — in Oyster Bay Cove. It’s an 11-container restaurant, so around 2,300 square feet. We just did the first seven containers between 8 o’clock and 12 o’clock today. And then tomorrow morning the last four will come. And the building will be closed in a day and a half. …

“We meet or exceed all of the structural codes.  … We’ve really approached this as an engineered building system. Every building system has some constrictions. Every product and every site works for containers. I would say that within reason we’ve been able to date to create the structure and the space plan that the structure affords.”

More here.

Photo: SG Blocks

Read Full Post »

Tallest Street Artwork

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Time for a new post on street art. Have you been following the Banksy-in-New-York saga? He was living in the city for a while last year, creating a new piece of street art every day. People ran around to find it, some New Yorkers even trying to charge admission. An HBO movie was made about it.

Banksy is always interesting, but today I want to tell you what street artist Stik has been up to.

The Londonist website says, “Street artist Stik has just finished creating the tallest piece of street art in the world — a 38.2 metre high mural on a condemned council tower block in Acton [a district in the west of London].

” ‘Big Mother’ depicts a mother and child looking forlornly from their council block at the luxury apartment complexes being built around them. The mural is visible from not only the Piccadilly Line, but also on some London flight paths.

“Stik, who was once homeless, said: ‘Affordable housing in Britain is under threat; this piece is to remind the world that all people need homes.’ ”

And I guess in this season a homeless mother and child is especially resonant.

Thank you to @ecpulford for retweeting the story from Bernadetta Keefe (@nxtstop1).

Stik’s website is here. His minimalist, wistful beings remind me a bit of Finnish artist Tove Jansson’s children’s books about the Moomin family.

First picture below, cover of paperback Finn Family Moomintroll

Second picture: Joyce/Division
The 38.2 metre mural has been painted on a tower block which is due for demolition in 2016. Image © Stik

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: