Mass Urban

“Imagining Housing for Today

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN  Nov. 16, 2011

Bronx Park East opened last year opposite the New York Botanical Garden. It consists of a five-story brick pavilion with triple-height windows facing the street, and a seven-story wing for 68 small studio apartments. “A good neighbor,” is how its designer, Jonathan Kirschenfeld, described the building’s look

Serious architecture is another way to describe Bronx Park East. It is a single-room occupancy residence, an S.R.O., built to house tenants who had been homeless. Sunny, with modest kitchens and full bathrooms, its apartments are smaller (around 285 square feet) than otherwise legally permitted for studios in New York because different rules apply to housing for social service clients. The building has a handsomely proportioned facade, spacious public rooms and light-filled hallways, none of it standard for an S.R.O.

The other morning a few residents were out on the sidewalk taking in the sun, chatting with people from next door. “Isn’t the idea here to improve mental health?” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “Isn’t good architecture part of that?”

It is, and Bronx Park East, like other S.R.O.’s Mr. Kirschenfeld has designed in the city, lends dignity to what at least used to be a byword for urban pariah and a building type that often resembled a prison.

But the project is exemplary for another reason, too.

Most new homes in the city today are still designed for nuclear families. According to the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, two parents raising young children occupy only 17 percent of New York dwellings; another 9 percent house single parents with children under 25. The city meanwhile has a growing population of singles — students, young professionals, immigrants, empty-nesters and the elderly — who can’t afford market-rate rentals. (That’s not to mention a report last week from the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group that has frequently clashed with the Bloomberg administration , which put the city’s homeless population at 41,204, up from 31,000 a decade ago.)

Households have evolved. But New York’s housing stock hasn’t. In essence, New Yorkers have increasingly had to adapt to the housing we’ve got, instead of designing and building the housing that suits who we have become.”

Via: NY Times

Photo: Rodrigo Pereda