Architect:

“Don’t Forget the Burbs

By Amanda Kolson Hurley

The global age of the city is upon us. But as June Williamson reminds us, architects and designers shouldn’t give up on the quest to retrofit suburbia.

Remember when we were going to save the suburbs? In 2008, Ellen Dunham-Jones, AIA, and June Williamson released Retrofitting Suburbia, a handbook for turning sprawl into walkable, sustainable, more urban places. The book got national media attention, Dunham-Jones gave a TED talk, and for a while, dead malls were the topic du jour.

Then the recession came, putting the brakes on many suburban redevelopment plans and shifting the attention of designers and policymakers elsewhere. We started to see the effects of climate change, such as powerful, more frequent storms, and grew concerned about resilience and adaptation, not just prevention. Meanwhile, Generation Y’s preference for city living intensified, and among designers, conversation shifted to designing for health and social impact, with a renewed interest in serving inner-city communities and the developing world.

The elephant in the room: In the United States, most of our aggregate metropolitan area is auto-dependent suburban sprawl, and it’s not going away. Meanwhile, countries such as China and India are starting to replicate our bad land-use decisions. If anything, the need to retrofit suburbia is more urgent now than it was five years ago, when it seemed more buzz-worthy.”

Image: A rendering of Attain This!, an affordable housing project that Holler Architecture and AB Architekten are designing in Deer Park, N.Y., for the Long Island Housing Partnership. The prototype is expected to achieve Passive House standards.

Courtesy of Tobias Holler of HOLLER Architecture and Matthias Altwicker of AB Architekten

The New York Times: 

“Rebuilding the Coastline, but at What Cost?

By Jenny Anderson. May 18, 2013

When a handful of retired homeowners from Osborn Island in New Jersey gathered last m“I said, look people, you built on a marsh island, it’s oxidizing under your feet — it’s shrinking — and that exacerbates the sea level rise,” said Dr. Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership, an estuary program financed by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Do you really want to throw good money after bad?”

Their answer? Yes”

Photo: Richard Perry/The New York Times

Fast Company: 

“Restarting Neighborhoods By Reactivating Abandoned Buildings

Impossible Living lets you tell the world about abandoned buildings in your neighborhood and crowdsource possible solutions or capital to get things humming again.

Ben Schiller. 

From Detroit to recession-hit Spain, the world is full of abandoned buildings: factories left by companies that went somewhere else, suburban subdivisions from the boom years, crumbling farms and churches in remote places. Italy has an estimated 2 million such properties; Spain, another 3.5 million; America, many more.

Andrea Sesta, who lives in Milan, has been trying to find alternative uses for some of them. His web site, Impossible Living, allows anyone to map unused real estate, and act as champions for their renewal (even if they don’t own them). If there’s a building standing empty near you, you can add an address, put up some photos and videos, and then call on the web to help develop new ideas. “It’s a communication tool between the activator and the community,” he says.”

Photo: Impossible Living

The Guardian: 

“Water sensitive design: integrating water with urban planning

For too long we have been designing water out of our cities when we should have been designing it in

Sue Illman. 19 April 2013

In March this year, the Mayor of London and RoDMA announced a tender to create the UK’s largest floating village in London’s Royal Docks, on an area one and a half times the size of Green Park. Planners in Norwich, meanwhile, will be scrutinising plans submitted earlier this year for a rain square and flood park that aims to create 670 homes and new public spaces on a flood-prone site at the juncture of the Wensum and Yare rivers.

As long as we want to keep developing in low-lying areas, particularly around our tidal rivers and coasts, then creating whole settlements that rise and fall as the water ebbs and flows is a perfectly legitimate solution. The Dutch – the ultimate early adopters when it comes to water – already boast examples such as Amsterdam’s pioneering Ijburg community. But for the majority of people living in urban centres, floating villages aren’t the future. In fact, they often obscure what we really need to be focusing on when we think about the relationship between our cities and water.”

Photo: The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. A water feature in the heart of a city will enhance the micro-climate and reduce heat island effect. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Architectural Record: 

“In Search of the $100 House

Citytank:

Driven into Poverty: Walkable urbanism and the suburbanization of poverty

David Moser pens a compelling essay that examines the ways in which sprawling auto-dependent land use patterns exacerbate poverty. As more low-income individuals and families are pushed to the suburbs, “this problem is gaining urgency.”

David Moser. March 8, 2013

American suburbs are a particularly bad place to be poor. Though poverty poses dire and unjust challenges no matter where it exists, sprawling and auto-dependent land use patterns can exacerbate these difficulties. And this problem is gaining urgency, as more and more of America’s low-income individuals now live in suburbs (or are being pushed there), a phenomenon the Brookings Institute has called “the suburbanization of poverty”.

There are many reasons suburbs make the experience of poverty worse, but first among them is that automobiles are really expensive. Purchasing, maintaining, repairing, insuring, and fueling a car can easily consume 50% or more of a limited income. For someone struggling to work themselves out of poverty, these expenses can wreck havoc on even the most diligent efforts to maintain a monthly budget. With gas now approaching or exceeding $4.00/gallon, a full day’s work at minimum wage sometimes won’t pay for a single tank of gas. The burdens of sprawl weigh heaviest on the poor.”

Placemakers:

Serving the Needs of Seniors: Solutions in practice

Hazel Borys. March 11, 2013.

Last month we talked about Connections, Community, and the Science of Loneliness, in which I lamented my parents’ generation lack of active communities geared toward people of all ages. Since then, I’ve looked a little more deeply into some of the newer neighborhoods designed around livability, to see which of them are offering especially graceful aging options.

My partner Ben Brown has pointed out that nothing in our $51 billion dollar age-segregated housing market provides quality of life that matches dwelling among our extended families. What if that market offered smaller homes — like cottages, condos, and row houses — within walking distance to both daily needs and larger family homes? Within walking distance from kids and grandkids? The most successful age-segregated housing taps into nearby communities, whether historic neighborhood centres, or newer mixed-use developments. Co-housing and multigenerational communities are advanced solutions.

Accessibility for seniors — with the addition of some universal design interior features — has the same requirements for just about everybody: walkable proximity to daily needs and transit.”

Photo:Image credit Flickr user Dan Reed.

The Atlantic Cities: 

“The U.S. Simply Doesn’t Have Enough Available Rental Housing, Whether You’re Rich or Poor

Emily Badger. Feb 25, 2013

The Census Bureau says there are about 41 million renter households in the United States, a group making up about 35 percent of the country. And the renter ranks are expected to swell this decade as the housing demand of Baby Boomers and their children starts to converge. Twentysomethings who’ve been living at home during the recession will finally move out to form their own households. Many Baby Boomers, meanwhile, are expected to downsize into smaller rentals units where they won’t have to mow their own lawns.

Housing wonks have projected that we may need to build at least 3 million new rental apartment units in the next 10 years to satisfy all these people. And if you’re a renter just about anywhere in the country, you may already be feeling the crunch: As Cities reported last summer, it’s lately become cheaper to buy a home than to rent one in the vast majority of America’s 100 largest metros.

This is a problem for young professionals and even decently paid ones trying to live close to jobs in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco. But America’s shortage of affordable rental housing trickles down with particularly depressing effects to the extremely low-income.”

Photo: Shutterstock

The New York Times: 

Creating Hipsturbia: 

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: February 15, 2013

A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.

 Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”

You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.”

Illustration: Ryan Inaza

The Lo-Down: 

NYCHA Plans Luxury Housing Alongside Five LES Public Housing Projects

The next big housing battle on the Lower East Side is upon us.  In the past month, officials with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) have been briefing elected officials and some tenant leaders about plans to lease a huge amount of property alongside public housing to private developers for market-rate apartments and retail.    Last night, at a meeting of Community Board 3′s land use committee, activists began to mobilize against the proposal, one tenant leader saying in regards to NYCHA, “if you want a war you’ve got a war.”

The cash-strapped agency has been talking about selling or leasing some of its property for years.  A 2008 report from the Manhattan Borough President found that the housing authority has more than 30 million square feet of unused property rights (including parking lots, playgrounds and open space).  In September, NYCHA Chairman John Rhea signaled that he was preparing to move ahead with the leasing plan as a way of narrowing the authority’s annual $60 million budget gap.

Members of the City Council, including local representatives Margaret Chin and Rosie Mendez, have been told that NYCHA plans to put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) from developers next month. The Daily News obtained “internal documents” showing an initial offering of three million square feet “in hot real estate neighborhoods, including the upper East and West Sides, the lower East Side and lower Manhattan.”

Photo: via Alfred E. Smith Houses Facebook page.