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#public housing
politijohn · 10 months
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Another contributor to the housing crisis
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radicalurbanista · 2 years
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i hate YIMBYs
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arc-hus · 2 months
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The Stopover Housing, Paris - Bruther
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So, in a very brief aside when you mentioned the spoke-and-wheel model for King's Landing. You also mentioned public housing in flea bottom, sewer and water systems, and public hospitals. I'm a little curious, what would that look like in a medieval setting? How would a system with a less developed administrative system handle public housing?
Administratively, it would be a lot simpler than our modern public/social housing system. It would probably look more like charity housing than a state system that provides comprehensive services above and beyond a roof over one's head, but it could be done in the period.
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This is the Fuggerei, the world's oldest continually-operating public housing that dates back to 1514. A 52-unit walled complex, these apartment buildings were a charitable donation by the famous Fugger banking family (it's good to be the personal bankers to the Hapsburgs when the Holy Roman Emperor doesn't quite understand international arbitrage in silver prices) to the poor people of Augsberg, Bavaria.
Eligibility criteria hasn't changed: in order to be eligible, residents must be living in poverty but not have debts, they must have lived in Augsburg for two years, and they must be Catholics. Likewise, rents haven't changed much: residents of the Fuggerei pay one Rhenish gulden (roughly 1 euro) a year, must say the Lord's Prayer, a Hail Mary, and the Nicene Creed once per day for the souls of the Fugger family, and must work at least part time.
So that's what public housing in Flea Bottom might look like.
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reasonsforhope · 4 months
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Catherine Borowski has always had an active imagination. As a child, she dreamed that the car park on her north London council estate would be transformed into a garden. The reality was quite different. “No one had a car, so it was empty, grey and depressing,” she says. Now a sculptor and event producer, Borowski has made it her mission to fill unloved urban spaces with flowers – albeit virtual ones. 
She and her partner Lee Baker are the founders of Graphic Rewilding, a project to install huge nature-inspired artworks into the urban landscape. “Where real rewilding isn’t possible, our goal is to inject the colour and diversity of nature into rundown spaces, urging people to notice – and find joy in – the world around them,” says Baker.   
The pair believe that flowers possess serious powers, even when they’re not real. “We know that spending time in nature is good for us, but studies show that even pictures of plants have a positive effect on the mind,” says Baker. He cites research published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which found that imagery of plants in hospital waiting rooms can help reduce feelings of stress in patients. 
Baker, a painter and music producer, has long understood the benefits of biophilic design. Having suffered a breakdown 10 years ago, he found that drawing flowers was the only way to soothe his buzzy brain. “I would set out to draw dystopian landscapes, representative of my state of mind, but I’d always end up drawing flowers, which uplifted me,” he says.
It was around this time that Baker met Borowski, joining her production company as creative director. The pair have collaborated ever since, launching Graphic Rewilding in 2021. Since then, they’ve installed floral murals at locations including Earl’s Court station, Lewes Castle and Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush – all hand drawn by Baker. “We love galleries, but we focus on public art,” he says. “This way, our work is out there for everyone to enjoy.”
This year the pair have grand plans to create a series of stained glass pavilions (think greenhouses with colourful floral-themed panels), which they hope might find homes at Kew Gardens and the Eden Project. “The way light shines through the glass is magical,” says Borowski.  
Even so, they concede that art is no match for Mother Nature. “Some people have suggested that our project detracts from real rewilding efforts. But both can co-exist,” says Borowski. “Of course we want more green spaces.” adds Baker. “But we aren’t gardeners. We’re artists. In the absence of nature, we want to create inspiring spaces through art.”
Overall, the response has been hugely positive. “The joy that these artworks bring is palpable,” says Baker, highlighting an early project in Crawley, West Sussex. “Many people in the town were employed by Gatwick airport and Covid had taken its toll,” he recalls. In a bid to spread some joy, the duo painted brick walls, billboards, benches and even bins with their signature floral flair. “Peoples’ reactions were heartwarming. There were so many smiling faces,” he says.
Elsewhere, in Earl’s Court, the pair transformed “a ratty piece of tarmac” into a modern-day pleasure garden, which is now often filled with children dancing and doing cartwheels on the way home from school. “Putting art into a place that previously felt unloved feels like cultivating joy where there was none,” reflects Borowski. “If something like this had been installed on my estate when I was a kid, it would have been a dream come true.”
-via Positive.News, November 6, 2023
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juliaknz · 3 days
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SCHNEIDER STUDER PRIMAS ZWICKY SÜD, 2016 Dübendorf, Switzerland Image © Andrea Helbling
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newyorkthegoldenage · 8 months
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"Meeting of the Minds," Kingsboro Housing Project, Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, 1940s.
Photo: Joe Schwartz via the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture
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snaps-away · 2 months
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"A Dickensian saga has unfolded in St. John's, ending in the eviction of an elderly woman from public housing, for no reason the city will talk about.
The move has left seniors and the disabled community scared and confused.
Offstage and invisible was Shirley Cox, a disabled 82-year-old woman whose mental and physical safety, access to shelter, material possessions and personal agency lay in the hands of at least 11 non-disabled people.
The tension in council chambers was palpable, as protesters waited, clinging to a tiny thread of hope that somebody, anybody, would move that this eviction be added to the agenda so someone could express dissent.
But there would be no hero, no plot twist, no happily-ever-after. 
Monday night's city council meeting included a dazzling performance of improvisational scripting, wandering narratives, ambient gaslighting, blame shifting, avoidance and scapegoating — backed by a chorus of echoes of the same oblique talking points, ad nauseam.
The mayor, resplendent in colonial regalia, dropped a gavel lest the name "Shirley Cox" be invoked in their presence.
Decorum must prevail, and anyway, they've done nothing illegal.
And just like that, a disabled senior woman was evicted from public housing without cause or explanation, and discarded into homelessness without any evident thought about the harm this will have first on Shirley Cox, but also on the disabilities community, and the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities who also are identified in the Human Rights Code as targets of discrimination.
The move is a signal to all of us that at any time, without disclosing why, even in the most dire of economic conditions, the city can and will evict."
Full article
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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timmurleyart · 1 month
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The new tenants. 🏙🌃🟧🟨🟥(mixed media collage)🏢
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politijohn · 1 year
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“Research shows it costs taxpayers $31,065 a year to criminalize a single person experiencing homelessness while the yearly cost for providing supportive housing is $10,051."
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cnu-newurbanism · 4 months
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Great Idea 23: Public housing that engages the city
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Public housing in the form of complete or partial neighborhoods started with HOPE VI and became standard practice, impacting the lives of people in cities and towns across America. Read more.
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todaysdocument · 1 year
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“The District’s greatest need is low-rent housing.” Statement for the Congressional Joint Committee on Housing (p.1) by John Ihlder, National Capital Housing Authority, on January 19, 1948.
Record Group 302: Records of the National Capital Housing Authority
Series: Public Housing Essays and Other Writings
Transcription: 
[underline] What is Needed in the District of Columbia [/underline]
Statement
for the
Congressional Joint Committee on Housing
by
John Ihlder, Executive Officer
National Capital Housing Authority
_______________________________
January 19, 1948
_______________________________
I have been asked to testify to your committee on what is needed in the District of Columbia.
[underline] The Need
The District's greatest need is low-rent housing.  [/underline]
This need is desperate.  It has resulted in suicide; it has resulted and is resulting in the break-up of families.  It is causing an increasing proportion of our people to believe that our government is indifferent to their suffering because they see home building effort concentrated upon building for the well-to-do.
This unmet need is condemning a great proportion of our children to life in our expanding slums, to life in unfit, insanitary, over-crowded and temporary dwellings.
The National Capital Housing Authority has some 17,000 low-income families on its waiting list, among them the families of more than 6,000 low-income veterans.  All of these veterans have young children.  It is providing for 8,774 families who are now its tenants.
All of these families are eligible for admission to public housing here only if their incomes are below definite levels.  None except veterans and servicemen are eligible for vacancies in war housing, and even they must have incomes of less than $3,000.  Veterans and non-veterans applying for low-rent housing must have family incomes of $1,950 or less if they have two or fewer dependent children, or $2,300 or less if they have three or more dependent children.
Tenants of low-rent housing become ineligible for [underline] continued [/underline] occupancy if they prosper to the extent of achieving a family income of $3,000.  But there are few proper privately owned houses which they can afford to rent.  Congress recognized this fact last July when it forbade eviction for over-income before March 1, 1948.
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racefortheironthrone · 8 months
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Re zoning regulation reform: could you go into detail as what that would look like in terms of wiping the slate clean. I feel like it would be better to go the houston route and just be zoning free
You do not want to go the Houston route.
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Houston may claim to be "zoning-free" - and to be fair, it doesn't have some of the more common regulations on land use, or density, or height restrictions (more on this in a minute) - but the reality is far more complicated and the status quo is not one that's friendly to the interests of working-class and poor residents, or to the possibility of sustainable urbanism.
The answer to NIMBYism isn't to abolish all regulations and let the free market rip, it's to surgically target zoning, planning, and litigation that is used against affordable housing, public/social housing, mass transit, clean energy, and walkable neighborhoods, and to replace it with new forms of regulation that encourage these forms of development.
So let's take take these categories in order.
Zoning
As I tell my Urban Studies students, zoning is both one of the most subtle and yet comprehensive ways in which the state shapes the urban environment - but historically it has been used almost exclusively in the interests of racism and classism. Reforming zoning requires going over the code with a fine-toothed comb to single out all the many ways in which zoning is used to make affordable housing impossible:
The most important one to tackle first is density zoning and building heights limitations. The former directly limits how many buildings you can have per unit of land (usually per acre), while the latter limits how big the buildings can be (expressed either as the number of stories or the number of feet, or as both). Closely associated with these zoning regulations are minimum lot size regulations (which regulate how much land each individual parcel of real estate has to cover, and thus how many how many housing units can be built in a given area), and lot coverage, setbacks, and minimum yard requirements (which limit how much square footage of a lot can be built on, and what kinds of structures you can build).
the other big one is use zoning. To begin with, we need to phase out "single use" zoning that designates certain areas as exclusively residential or commercial or industrial (a major factor that drives car-centric development, makes walkable neighborhoods impossible, and discourages the "insula" style apartment building that has been the core of urbanism since Ancient Rome) in favor of "mixed use" zoning that allows for neighborhoods that combine residential and commercial uses. Equally importantly, we need to eliminate single-family zoning and adopt zoning rules that allow for a mix of different kinds of housing (ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, rowhouses/terraced houses, apartment buildings).
finally, the most insidious zoning requirements are seemingly incidental regulations. For example, mandatory parking minimums not only prioitize car-dependent versus transit-oriented development but also eat up huge amounts of space per lot. The most nakedly classist is "unrelated persons" zoning, which is used to prevent poorer people from subdividing houses into apartments, which zaps young people who are looking to be roommates and older people looking to finance their retirements by running boarding houses or taking in lodgers, as well as landlords looking to convert houses from owner-occupied to rental properties.
So I would argue that the goal of reform should be not to eliminate zoning, but rather to establish model zoning codes that have been stripped of the historical legacies of racism and classism.
Planning
Similar to how zoning shouldn't be abolished but reformed, the correct approach to planning isn't to abolish planning departments wholesale, but to streamline the planning process - because the problem is that right now the planning process is too slow, which raises the costs of all kinds of development (we're focusing on housing right now, but the same holds true for clean energy projects), and it allows NIMBY groups to abuse the public hearings and environmental review process to block projects that are good for the environment and working-class and poor people but bad for affluent homeowners.
As those Ezra Klein interviews indicate, this is beginning to change due to a combination of reforms at both the state and federal level to speed up the CEQA and EPA environmental review process in a number of ways. For example, one change that's being made is to require planning agencies and environmental agencies to report on the environmental impact of not doing a project as well, to shift the discussion away from petty complaints about noise and traffic and "neighborhood character" (i.e, coded racism and classism) and towards real discussions of social and environmental justice.
At the same time, more is needed - especially to reform the public hearing process. While originally intended by Jane Jacobs and other activists in the 1970s as a democratic reform that would give local communities a voice in the planning process, "participatory planning" has become a way for special interests to exercise an unaccountable veto power over development. Because younger, poorer and more working class, and communities of color often don't have time to attend public hearing sessions during the workday, these meetings become dominated by older, whiter, and richer residents who claim to speak for the whole of the community.
Moreover, because community boards are appointed rather than elected and public hearings operate on a first-come-first-serve basis, an unrepresentative minority can create a false impression of community opposition by "stacking the mike" and dialing up their level of militancy and aggression in the face of elected officials and civil servants who want to avoid controversy. (It's a classic case of diffuse versus concentrated interests, something that I spend a lot of classroom time making sure that my students learn.)
Again, the point shouldn't be to eliminate public hearings and other forms of participatory planning, but to reform them so that they're more representative (shifting public hearings to weekends and allowing people to comment via Zoom and other online forums, conducting surveys of community opinion, using a progressive stack and requiring equal time between pro and anti speakers, etc.) and to streamline the review process for model projects in categories like affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit, etc.
Litigation
Alongside the main planning process, there is also a need to reform the litigation process around development. In addition to traditional tort lawsuits from property owners claiming damage to their property from development, a lot of planning and environemntal legislation allows for private groups to sue over a host of issues - whether the agency followed the correct procedures, whether it took into account concerns about this impact or that impact, and so forth.
As we saw with the case of Berkeley NIMBYs who used CEQA to block student housing projects over environmental impacts around "noise," this process can be used to either block projects outright, or even if the NIMBYs eventually lose in court, to draw out the process until projects fall apart due to lack of funding or the proponents simply lose their patience and give up.
This is why we're starting to see significant reforms to both state and federal legislation to streamline the litigation process. The categorical exemptions from review that I discussed above also have implications for litigation - you can't sue over reviews that didn't happen - but there are also efforts to speed up the litigation process through reducing what counts as "administrative record" or by putting a nine-month cap on court proceedings.
Again, this is an area where you have to be very surgical in your changes. Especially when the politics of the issue divide environmental groups and create odd coalitions between labor, business, climate change activists, and anti-regulation conservatives, you have to be careful that the changes you are making benefit affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit and the like, not oil pipelines and suburban sprawl.
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