Current conditions on the Queensway | Photo: Neil Sullivan via Old NYC

WILL QUEENS GET ITS OWN HIGH LINE?
The High Line is in many ways unique, but it’s by no means the only disused urban rail line in New York in need of repurposing. In Queens, the 3.5 mile leg of the Rockaway Beach Branch rail line, out of service since 1962, runs from Rego Park to the Ozone Park Trailhead, over auto-body shops, through Forest Park and a number of residential neighborhoods. While the current proposals reference the success of the High Line, they differ in intended audience and scope. Friends of the Queensway, the group leading the effort to create a new public space, is prioritizing providing amenities for the surrounding community — such as much-need bicycle infrastructure and community garden space — rather than primarily serving as a tourist attraction. Read more coverage on Treehugger.

The George Washington Bridge in Heavy Smog. View toward the New Jersey Side of the Hudson River | From the Documerica collection.

WHAT AMERICA LOOKED LIKE BEFORE THE EPA
In the 1970s, one of the early acts of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a documentary effort called Documerica, for which EPA photographers travelled the country to capture the state of the nation in ecological terms. Forty years later, the National Archives has released 15,000 of the 80,000 photographs the project produced, many of which portray the harsh reality of our national landscape prior to an overhaul in environmental regulation. Be sure to explore these powerful photographs on the National Archive Flickr database and check out more about the collection on Grist.

MetroChange

METROCHANGE
When there’s not enough money left on your MetroCard for a trip, do you toss it? Apparently, lost or discarded MetroCards account for millions of dollars in wasted funds. So, NYU students Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May have collaborated to create a charity donation platform, called “MetroChange,” intended to turn these losses into gains for the city’s neediest families. The project calls for MetroChange kiosks to be installed in the subway, where commuters can swipe their cards (and recycle them) to donate the remainder of the value left of the car to charity. Read more about this project on the MetroChange blog.

RETHINKING AMERICA’S PARKING CULTURE
For those commuters who don’t use a MetroCard to get around this city, the availability, price and logistics of parking your vehicle often determine driver behavior. In most of the rest of the country, however, parking is abundant and takes up uncalculated amounts of land. Eran Ben-Joseph explores the problems and possibilities of parking in Rethinking a Lot, a new book published by MIT Press, that advocates for a transformation of parking lots into appealing, environmentally sound and better integrated features of our built environment. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, explores Ben-Joseph’s argument that parking lots need to be taken seriously by designers and urbanists. Accompanying the article is a fascinating slideshow that encourages a reconsideration of this ubiquitous form that has, until recently, somehow eluded critical investigation by scholars of architecture, urbanism and the American landscape.

NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY TO CONSIDER SELLING AIR RIGHTS, RAISING RENT CAP
On Monday, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) released its five year plan, in which it announced the selling of air rights — the space that can be developed above buildings — as one potential strategy to redress its budget deficit. According to WNYC, NYCHA has also proposed raising the current $2000 rent cap and requiring all households to pay 30% of their income in rent.

BUS TIME
BusTime, the real-time bus tracking website, is now available for all of Staten Island. By allowing users to view exactly how far their bus is from their chosen stop, the real-time bus information “means more time at home with your family, relaxing with a cup of coffee,” according to MTA chairman Joe Lhota. Riders can access the information online, on a mobile phone (simply text a bust stop code to 511123), or — starting this spring — by scanning a QR code at the bus stop. Previously the MTA was having trouble reliably tracking buses through the tall buildings in Manhattan, but Bus Time’s opening up to all of Staten Island bodes well for the other four boroughs, all of which should have complete Bus Time service by 2013 . Read more on StreetsBlog.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In our quest to bring you a wide range of urban thought and action, Urban Omnibus has, over the past two years, shared perspectives on the social and environmental promise of vertical density, on the rich diversity of New York’s housing typologies, and on the specific social and cultural conditions of certain New York neighborhoods, from Jackson Heights to the East Village to East New York. This week, Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro brings those three themes together in a historical snapshot of Starrett City, a major housing development built between 1972 and 1976 in Southeastern Brooklyn.

Starrett City’s history is singular, formed in the urban crosscurrents of race, class, housing policy and the ever-evolving idea of community. As Genevro delved deeper into this story, speaking with long-time residents and some of the people who helped create and manage the development, she found much more than an account of how a fascinating New York neighborhood got to be that way. She found a thought-provoking counter-example to trends in housing and urban policy that prioritize individualized kinds of built form and ownership over shared resources and collective aspiration. 

The need to rethink shared resources is a recurring theme in innovative thinking about housing current and future urban populations. Just last week, the Architectural League joined with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council to unveil some provocative schemes for residential units and buildings that address New York’s shortage of housing for single adults and other “unconventional” households — households that form the large majority in the city these days. The schemes are part of the Making Room project, and were produced by four teams of architects whom CHPC and the League commissioned to test what kinds of housing could be produced for New Yorkers if certain housing regulations and standards were reconsidered. The architects’ proposals and the proceedings of the Making Room symposium will be available very soon on the Making Room website and the Architectural League’s website. One of the threads connecting the proposals was an emphasis on shared facilities and common spaces, which poses some interesting questions about the very idea of “home.”

In thinking about these questions, New Yorkers have a number of rich traditions to draw on. The cooperative housing model is much more ingrained here than in other cities. The diversity of our multifamily housing stock already relies inherently on sharing — boiler systems, lobbies, hallways — and on the intensive use of our streets and other public places. Looking a little deeper into the social story that inhabits the built environment — in this case, the story behind one of the last New York City developments built on the tower-in-the-park model — can only help illuminate new thinking about the relationship between people and buildings, and just might challenge us to question some of our basic assumptions about house, home and the American landscape. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user C-Monster

Some months ago I was asked to take part in a series of lectures on the reverberations of the idea of “house” in American culture. Being a New Yorker, I immediately moved away from “house” and towards “home” and “apartment.” To my mind, American mythmaking has given far too much weight to “house.” What interests me more is the idea of home and the many, many different ways Americans construct that. If the idea of “house” didn’t wield so much influence, what might that mean for public policy?

I have been intrigued by Starrett City for quite a while, since spending time in the neighboring district of East New York working on Architectural League projects on housing, park and community design. Starrett — renamed Spring Creek Towers in 2002 — is a community that works. It is one of the most racially integrated areas of the city; it is safe; and if the buildings themselves seem uninspired on the exterior, they nevertheless provide accommodating, affordable housing for moderate income New Yorkers in a well-tended landscape. There is a large group of residents who feel deeply connected to Starrett/Spring Creek Towers and who feel that it provides all they are looking for in a place to live. So the question is: How did a group of high-rise, unlovely brick buildings designed on the much-maligned tower-in-the-park model and built on a former landfill on the very edge of Brooklyn ever manage to become “home”?

THE SITE
The 46 residential towers of Starrett City, along with parking garages, a power plant, sports center and shopping center, were built from 1972 to 1976 on a large, marshy, city-owned site in southeast Brooklyn. Since the late 1960s, efforts had been made to develop the site, which offered the possibility of creating a very large number of new housing units without having to relocate current residents. The project site, between Flatlands Avenue and the Shore Parkway on the edge of Jamaica Bay near the Brooklyn/Queens border, had been used as a landfill. It was located across a small inlet from the Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Canarsie, and on its north side abutted East New York, which had changed during the 1950s and ‘60s from working-class Italian and Jewish to largely low-income black and Hispanic residents.

THE POLITICAL CLIMATE
New York City in 1972 was a city under stress. Crime was high and increasing; racial tensions were inflamed, the city’s manufacturing job base was disappearing, and its fiscal situation was deteriorating. Liberal Republican John Lindsay was mayor. He had attempted to introduce new approaches to planning, experimented with decentralization of control of the schools, and made an effort to integrate residential neighborhoods through introducing scatter-site public housing. But the ambitious 1969 plan for the city, developed by the City Planning Department, was never enacted; the effort at school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville eventually resulted in an enormously destructive teachers’ strike; and attempts to integrate New York neighborhoods produced an tense situation surrounding the Housing Authority’s proposal to build a project in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills. In general, there was widespread skepticism about the motives and capabilities of liberal-led government.

THE PROJECT
Work to develop the landfill site had been begun by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a union coalition that had developed a large number of cooperative apartments in New York over the years. UHF and its leader, Abraham Kazan, were pioneers in the development of workers’ cooperatives in New York City, and had created a substantial body of well-built, carefully managed, desirable and long-lasting housing that continues to this day to account for a very significant portion of New York City’s middle-income housing stock. For this and other projects, Kazan and the UHF worked with the architect Herman Jessor, who devoted his entire 60+ year career to the design of housing for workers, including the more than 40,000 units built by the United Housing Foundation in such projects as Penn South, Hillman Houses, and Co-op City. Jessor was known for his mastery of construction technology and building and zoning codes, and a superbly honed capacity to deliver the greatest possible amount and most practically usable space in his apartments.

Penn South

Hillman Houses

Co-op City and Baychester

In keeping with its other projects, the United Housing Foundation envisioned the Twin Pines development — as Starrett City was initially called — as a cooperative. But rising construction, financing and energy costs, and the fact that UHF was simultaneously developing Co-op City in the Bronx, forced the organization to sell the unfinished development. It found a willing buyer in the Starrett Company. Starrett saw potential in taking over the project because of a recent change in the tax laws, making it possible to sell tax shelters for low and moderate income rental (but not co-op) housing and thereby providing a very lucrative benefit to investors.

In the volatile racial climate of early-’70s New York, the change from a cooperative project to a rental project generated a great deal of controversy, because many residents of nearby Jamaica Bay neighborhoods equated rentals with low income black tenants and feared that the new project would “tip” the Brooklyn shore to all minority tenancy. To get the project approved, Starrett Housing Corporation promised the city’s Board of Estimate that it would create and sustain an integrated development with a 70 percent white population, which was the figure the developers believed would prevent the project from “tipping.”

Starrett City under construction

AN INTEGRATED COMMUNITY
Starrett hired a Lindsay administration housing official named Robert Rosenberg to create the integrated project that Starrett had promised the Board of Estimate — but which the company had no idea how to deliver. Realizing his task was first of all a marketing challenge, Rosenberg made a number of moves to make the development more attractive and to reinforce the sense that this was a fresh new community. He insisted on completing the buildings near the Shore Parkway first, rather than on the north near Flatlands. Prospective tenants would come into the development from the water side, rather than passing through the deteriorated blocks of East New York. He invested more in the landscaping than had originally been budgeted, and built an on-site sports club. He added canopies to the buildings, built a shopping center, and successfully lobbied to have an elementary school built on the site, with lots of parking that proved to be a significant attraction for teachers. He created a private security force for the project.

Making the apartments themselves appealing required less effort: the fact that the original architectural program was for cooperative units meant that they were larger than typical New York City rental apartments. Jessor designed apartment buildings from the inside out, with cross-ventilation in the bedrooms, entry foyers and windowed kitchens. Rosenberg skillfully used all these features in his marketing. He organized the first focus groups ever employed in multifamily rental housing, and he made the first television ads for a rental development.

He also managed the tenant selection process to make every building and every floor integrated. In 1988, 12 years after the development opened, an article in The New York Times called Starrett City perhaps the most integrated area of New York City: 62% white, 23% black, 9% Hispanic and 6% Asian or people of mixed race. Twenty years later, in 2007, the Starrett City census tract was 32% white, 41% black and 19% Hispanic. How these levels of integration were initially achieved — through the use of separate waiting lists for white and minority tenants — was the subject of a suit brought by the NAACP, which was settled in 1987 with an agreement that Starrett City would increase the number of apartments made available to minority applicants and that 20 other New York State housing projects built under the Mitchell-Lama program would set integration goals. This settlement was challenged by the Reagan Justice Department, which argued that the waiting lists constituted illegal use of quotas. This argument prevailed and the use of multiple waiting lists was ended.

Notwithstanding the controversy and attention that surrounded the suits, something significant — a community — had been established at Starrett City. Whether because of Rosenberg’s skillful marketing, or the fact that he and his tenant relations staff had an ample budget to fund tenant clubs and activities, or something about the self-selection of the tenants, or whether it was the aspiration to integration itself, Starrett residents seem, from the start, to have perceived their development as something particular and appealing.

Ellie Mandell, the white president of the local school board, told a newspaper reporter in 1988: “We want to live in an integrated community, that’s what we’re all about. Maybe we didn’t do so well in our generation, but we hope the kids who are growing up here together will do better.” Spencer Holden, a black resident and president of the Onyx Society, a benevolent association, told the same reporter: “I have lived all over New York and this is 1,000 percent better than any other neighborhood. I’m not saying everyone’s just nice, nice, nice. But when you’ve got blacks, Jews, Italians, all living together on the same floor, you’re not going to be yelling crazy things. I’m not saying everybody loves everybody else, but everybody lives with everybody else in a comfortable civilized manner.”

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In over 20 years as the executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

This week, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) and the Architectural League are pleased to announce the Making Room Symposium, to be held on November 7 at the Japan Society. Buy your tickets today.

Making Room Symposium
Monday, November 7, 2011
8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
4.5 HSW CEUs

Making Room Afterparty in Nolita
Wine, hors d’oeuvres, and live jazz
6:00 p.m.
Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral Youth Center
263 Mulberry Street

For the latest information about this event, click here.

New York has an incredibly diverse population that lives in incredibly diverse ways. Yet the city’s housing, much of which was produced in the 20th century, does not meet the needs of a 21st century population. Households across the economic spectrum – from graduate students to senior citizens, extended families to multiple roommates, single professionals to working artists – are compelled to improvise their living arrangements in housing that can be illegal or unsafe. What New Yorkers need are more housing choices.

Making Room is a research and advocacy project initiated by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) to increase the range of options in New York’s housing market. Through its research, CHPC identified ways in which current housing regulations and standards in New York constrain the range of choices the market can offer, particularly for single-person households, shared dwellings and multi-generational households, through restrictions on unit size, subdivisions of existing units and definitions of who may jointly occupy units. To build on its research, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with it in a design study to propose and evaluate new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now.

The Making Room symposium will present innovative ideas produced by teams of architects commissioned by CHPC and the League, and in-depth discussion of their proposals by government officials, international architects and other experts. Making Room will point the ways forward to introduce more legal and safe options into New York City’s housing market. At the end of the day, the Making Room “after-party” will provide an opportunity for further informal discussion with the day’s presenters and others from across the spectrum of the housing and real estate communities.

Tickets
To buy tickets, click here.
Design Symposium (breakfast and lunch included) $150; Evening reception, $100; Discount rate for both events, $225. Student rate, $50 for both events (with current ID). There is no additional discount for Architectural League members. This event has limited capacity; to ensure a ticket, please register by October 31st. Tickets will be available at the door, space permitting.

Featuring presentations of work by
Stan Allen & Rafi Segal – Principal, Stan Allen Architect and Dean, Princeton University School of Architecture; Founder, Rafi Segal Architecture Urbanism
Deborah Gans – Principal, Gans Studio and professor, Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Peter Gluck – Principal, Peter Gluck and Partners Architects
Jonathan Kirschenfeld – Principal, Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects
Ted Smith – Principal, Smith & Others

With discussions of the designs presented and related policy issues by
Matthew Blesso - President, Blesso Properties
David Bragdon – Director, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
Azby Brown – Founder, Future Design Institute, Tokyo
David Burney – Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction
Seth Diamond – Commissioner, NYC Department of Homeless Services
Alex Garvin - Principal, Alex Garvin and Associates
Rosalie Genevro – Executive Director, Architectural League of New York
Linda Gibbs – Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New York
Mark Ginsberg – Partner, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
Amie Gross – President, Amie Gross Architects
Vicente Guallart - Founder, Guallart Architects and Chief Architect, City of Barcelona
Rosanne Haggerty - President, Community Solutions
Graham Hill – Founder, treehugger.com
Robert LiMandri – Commissioner, NYC Department of Buildings
Jerilyn Perine – Executive Director, Citizens Housing & Planning Council
Mark Strauss – Senior Partner, FXFOWLE Architects
Mathew Wambua – Commissioner, NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development
Tom Wargo – Director of Zoning, NYC Department of City Planning

Making Room has been made possible through a generous grant to CHPC from the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the support of the CHPC Board of Directors, the Lavanburg Foundation, the estate of Marian R. Naumburg, Edison Properties, and the Japan Society of New York.

…………….

SOUTH BRONX RISING
This week, The New York Times new architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took a walk with NYC’s planning commissioner Amanda Burden through the South Bronx. They discuss the area’s long journey after decades of disinvestment and neglect and cite the importance of Nos Quedamos and Yolanda Garcia’s vision of what the South Bronx could become in driving its apparent resurgence, alongside the Bloomberg administration’s smart decisions about the physical elements that make a neighborhood: maintaining a street wall, ground floor retail, street trees and density. The walking tour ends with a followup to Kimmelman’s review of a new residential development in the neighborhood, Via Verde. Check out the video and the write up of the tour.

WHERE TO SHARE?
A couple of weeks ago, Janette Sadik-Khan announced that New York City was starting a new bike share program, set to open with 1000 bikes and 600 docking stations, and asked New Yorkers to suggest where to the stations should be placed. But how will the final locations be selected? The Atlantic Cities reports on the complexities of deciding exactly that. Working with Alta Bike Share, the company selected to implement the program, the city will  ”first target optimal service areas using detailed data models and public suggestions, then approach community boards that govern these areas with at least three possible locations, and last allow the neighborhoods themselves to make the ultimate decision.” In order to reveal the complex methodology of locating the nodes of this new infrastructural system, the article goes on to explain in detail the three “pillars” of a successful bike share program, “high density of stations, close proximity to transit and community feedback.” The public presentations begin next week. Check out the schedule of community meetings and other events at the bike share program’s timeline, and head over to Streetsblog for up-to-date coverage as this program unfolds.

TOO MUCH PARKING!
When people complain about parking in New York, the gripe isn’t usually that New York City has too many spaces. Yet, according to an article in Crain’s New York this week, Robert Moses-era zoning laws dictate that in new residential construction outside of Manhattan, the developer must build four parking spots for every ten residential units, despite New York’s comprehensive mass transit system. Building owners are losing money on predominantly empty parking garages. And even facilities that draw large crowds, like Yankee Stadium, have parking lots that remain mostly empty much of the time. The Yankee Stadium example is now prompting fears that the parking allotment for the contested Atlantic Yards Stadium in Brooklyn will also remain under-utilized. The prospect of a giant blacktop hole adds to an increasing number of concerns about the new development.

PEANUT PARK
New York City is becoming increasingly dependent upon public-private partnerships to maintain its parks. Central Park and Bryant Park have both been arguably saved by such partnerships, to name only two. This week, a new park has opened, this time sponsored by Planters, of nut fame. Mr. Peanut made the requisite appearance at the opening, monocle and all. While there may be something built into the premise of corporate sponsorship of public, even semi-public parks, that smacks ominously of corporate encroachment into civic life, the results are encouraging. Planters Grove, one of three such parks sponsored by Planters and designed by Ken Smith, was built for The Wald Houses, a public housing development in the East Village. The garden allows residents of the project access to the herbs planted there, and will also be open to the larger neighborhood. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

EVENTS and TO DOs

CINEBEASTS’ GOWANDERLUST!
This Saturday evening, Cinebeasts is hosting Gowanderlust! with Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker and film festival programmer. Kensinger will be leading a “zig-zagging tour-screening” — part walking tour, part short film screening — along one of the cities most historied and fascinating industrial landscapes, the Gowanus Canal. Buy your tickets here and then join them Saturday, October 8th at sundown in front of the Bell House, 149 7th Street. A reception, including refreshments provided by Brooklyn Brewery and Cabinet Magazine, will follow at Cabinet Space. For more information, check out Cinebeasts.

OPENHOUSENEWYORK
The 9th annual openhousenewyork, when some of the city’s most spectacular and hard to access spaces and structures open their doors/gates/elevators/ladders/trap-doors to the public for viewings, takes place the weekend of October 14th-16th. Many talks, tours, and workshops are free; some require advance reservations (with a $5 fee). As usual, people are snatching up reservations fast, so be sure to plan your weekend soon. Here’s just a sampling of what you can find in the slate of events: the Holly Whyte Way Arcade Parade, a walking tour along the Old Croton Aqueduct (in both Manhattan and the Bronx), a walking tour on Shaping Urban Design and Policy: The East 96th Street Corridor, Brooklyn Bridge Park (previous coverage of BBP here), Elastic City’s Monumental Walk (previously), Pier Luigi Nervi’s George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, AVAC System on Roosevelt Island (previously), the final days of the BMW Guggenheim Lab (previously), Lyn Rice Architects, Architecture Research Office (ARO), East Harlem School (previously), the Arsenal, Noguchi Museum (stay tuned for more on this next week!), the Digester Eggs at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Little Red Lighthouse, Fresh Kills by Bus, Build It! Architecture Workshop, Urbanitis East Harlem Tour, Chris Pellettieri’s Stone Carving Workshop at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, East 4th Street Cultural District Tour (previously), El Puente South Williamsburg Walking Tour, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Melrose Commons, or tour the city on bikes with either the NYC DOT, a historian Exploring the Street Grid, or with Velo City’s high school student guides teaching you about urban design. Download a PDF event guide here or click through to make reservations on the OHNY site.

ILLUMINATING THE CITY
Last weekend’s Bring to Light, New York’s second Nuit Blanche festival, brought light sculpture, installations and video to the walls, streets, alleys and public spaces of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tomorrow, the New Museum is hosting a panel discussion to consider the potential of the Nuit Blanche model to reimagine public space and catalyze dialogue. “Illuminating the City: Site-Specific Art as Urban Activator” will start at 4pm and will feature Ethan Vogt and Ken Farmer of Nuit Blanche New York; Eva Franch, director of Storefront; Stephanie Thayer, executive director of the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn; David van der Leer, assistant curator for architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim; with more panelists to be announced. Buy tickets or find more information here. And if you missed Bring to Light last weekend, check out photos from the event in Time Out,  Flavorwire and on the Bring to Light website.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

UPDATE: Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times coverage of the CHPC/Architectural League Making Room project and symposium is now available at nytimes.com.

UPDATE: Making Room symposium details announced: Monday, November 7, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. at the Japan Society. (NOTE: This event has passed.)

New York City has a remarkably diverse population and, in many respects, a remarkably heterogeneous housing stock to provide it shelter. From Riverdale to Tottenville, Flushing to Chelsea, Washington Heights to Jackson Heights to Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers inhabit an amazing spectrum of residential building types, developed and accumulated over the history of the city. At many critical junctures over the last century and a half, New York City has been an innovative leader in housing regulation and finance, encouraging and shaping development to ensure that dwellings are safe and respond to evolving standards of livability.

But even with the great resources of its varied housing stock and its strong tradition of housing advocacy and reform, New York has a hard time producing enough housing to meet demand. And in moments of economic and social transition, housing supply and housing need can get seriously out of whack.

Over the last several years, the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) has been researching and analyzing how and where New York’s residents live and the housing that is available to them. Their findings have revealed many discrepancies between the kinds of houses and apartments people need and those they can find. CHPC has identified New York City’s accreted mass of housing regulations and standards — all created with progressive and worthy goals in mind — as one of the factors that contributes to this mismatch. For example, regulations have tilted what the housing market produces towards larger units, for households assumed to be “families,” even though only 17% of New York’s dwelling units are occupied by traditional nuclear families. A huge underground or improvised housing market has developed over the last two decades as people try, often in desperation, to find places to live that are affordable and can accommodate their particular needs.

Around the world, architects, developers and policymakers are responding to the shifting demands of urban dwellers with new forms of housing in ways New York is not. If our city wants to continue to respond to the needs of its dynamic population, it must continue to innovate in the types of housing it produces. In 2009, CHPC brought architects from Tokyo, Barcelona, San Diego, Montreal and Leipzig to New York for a landmark symposium (read UO‘s coverage of that event here) that introduced an audience of housing experts from design, development, law, policy and government to the vanguard of housing design for 21st century cities.

This symposium was part of a broader project — called Making Room — to take a fresh look at how housing and space standards constrict the choices architects and developers are able to introduce into New York’s housing market. To move that project forward, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with them to carry out a design study to produce new models for comfortable, desirable dwellings. Four teams of leading New York architects, each with expertise and a particular perspective, have been asked to respond to this challenge. On Monday, November 7, the architects and their teams — Stan Allen and Rafi Segal; Deborah Gans; Peter Gluck; and Jonathan Kirschenfeld — will present their ideas in an all-day symposium. This event is only one part of a much larger research and advocacy project that will include exhibiting these designs publicly and identifying what laws and codes currently on the books are preventing new modes of residential living from becoming available.

In the video above, CHPC Executive Director Jerilyn Perine (who was formerly the commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development), Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro, Chhaya Community Development Corporation Executive Director Seema Agnani, and Blesso Properties President and Founder Matthew Blesso discuss the state of the city’s housing, the underground housing market and some of the kinds of changes that could make New York housing more responsive to the ways we live now. Over the coming months, Urban Omnibus will be providing regular updates on the Making Room project as it develops. Stay tuned.

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Matthew Blesso is President and Founder of Blesso Properties. Prior to founding Blesso Properties, he worked as a commercial lender, most recently in the Real Estate Finance Group at BHF Bank (now PB Capital), a German bank. Matt is a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Municipal Arts Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Urban Land Institute, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the Manhattan Real Estate Network. He is also a member of Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for the Citizen Housing and Planning Counsel and a founding member and the chairman of the Leadership Board of the Fourth Arts Block as well as Board member of the Institute For Urban Design.

In over 20 years as executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Jerilyn Perine is the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) where she spearheads a high impact agenda to improve the quality of public debate, inform public policy, promote new ideas, and engage a wide audience as well as a diverse and active Board Membership to improve NYC neighborhoods. Ms. Perine is an urban planner with 30 years of experience in housing and community development. She was appointed Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by both Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to lead America’s largest municipal housing agency with more than 3000 employees and an annual operating and capital budget of $800 million. As Commissioner, Ms. Perine was the author of Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, announced in December 2002 that provided $3 billion over 5 years to preserve and create over 65,000 units of affordable housing. Under Mayor Giuliani she designed and oversaw the management and operation of programs designed to return a significant inventory of tax foreclosed residential property to local, private ownership. Ms. Perine is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was a member of the International Brownfield Exchange between 1998 and 2002. She serves on the board of Highbridge Voices, a children’s choir in the South Bronx; West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing; and the New York Housing Conference.

PLACE PULSE
When we familiarize ourselves with new surroundings, we often rely on our instincts more than guidebooks or demographic studies. We feel it out, without consciously asking ourselves the questions of whether a neighborhood seems safe, active, clean, unique. Place Pulse, a new tool from the Macro Connections group out of the MIT Media Lab, wants to tap into these urban perceptions through online crowdsourcing. Place Pulse shows photos from cities all over the world and asks users to rate the pictures (without geographical knowledge) based on a uniqueness, safety and class level. The data from the ratings is then geographically coded, creating a database of crowdsourced gut reactions. Read more at Co.Design.

KEY TO THE (AFFORDABLE) CITY
NYCHA and HPD have recently partnered in a search to find a private developer to retrofit the Randolph Houses on West 114th Street into a mix of 140 new public housing units and at least 155 affordable housing units. The properties are yet another entry in the infamously long and ever deteriorating list of “white flight”-era abandoned housing. Built in the 1890s to house the influx of European immigrants, the tenements today are mostly vacant, with only 109 of 452 units currently occupied.  This project will help to reoccupy an “entire block of historical architectural significance,” and help to repair many units that have been subdivided into arrangements that are dangerous and/or illegal. By cross-subsidizing the project with a private developer, the city is able to get more bang for their buck out of the new developments, despite a net reduction in the number of units in the buildings. For more on what makes this deal innovative and perhaps exemplary (the development marks the first time “affordable and public housing units will be intermixed within the same buildings”), read Matt Chaban’s article in The Observer.

LET’S GET CRITICAL
Let’s Get Critical, a new collection of critical writing curated by Alexandra Lange, debuted this week. The premise of what Lange refers to as a “short-form blog” is to create a centralized location where one can always find enjoyable and interesting cultural commentary. Similar to other quality article aggregators, Lange aims to have each featured piece on the new site “well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky.” For more criticism, check out Lange’s Let’s Get Critical, or revisit our On Criticism series.

CRAINIUM
Crain’s New York, a valuable source for reporting on all things business and industry in New York City, releases an annual report on the city’s economy entitled “CityFacts.” This year, they’re also offering an online resource that allows readers to explore the enormous amount of data they have mined for the issue. CityFacts is devoted to showing, in an attractive and legible way, how New York City is doing financially, educationally, demographically, commercially and transportation-ly. Learn more about this year’s CityFacts from the “This Week in Crain’s” podcast, keep up with Crain’s numbers-based news on their Twitter feed @StatsAndTheCity, or check out the CityFacts mini-site here.

PIN-UP
Everybody knows the red pin that marks locations in Google Maps. It marks the starting point of a trip or an important location. It casts a shadow on the map and, notably, if you just type in the name of a city, it picks a point somewhere within the city that Google Maps has decided is the center of the city, casting that shadow on the surrounding city features. In an effort to show us just how much the digital world is bleeding into the physical, artist Aram Bartholl is installing “life-size” map markers in the Google Maps centers of a handful of cities. Read more at Architizer, or check out an interview with the artist on the Rhizome blog.

IRT RIDES AGAIN
If you are like us, then your favorite part of the MTA Transit Museum is walking through the old trains, looking at the ads, and imagining what life was like in an era when people got to ride on them. In some ways it must have been wonderful (padded seats), in others, less so (no air-conditioning). Well, you’re in luck! The IRT is back! (for the month of September). The team at HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, in an effort to advertise their period piece drama, has retrofitted a 1917 IRT train to run along the 2/3 track in Manhattan from noon to 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays starting September 3rd.

EVENTS & TO-DOs:

GEOLOGIC CITY
Last year, Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth gave Omnibus readers a taste of the “Geologic City Field Reports” they’ve been publishing on their blog Friends of the Pleistocene, to get us thinking about how deep geologic time is connected to the built environment of New York. Now, Kruse and Ellsworth are launching Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York, the result of their research and explorations. Join them along with dynamic urban-systems-and-architecture duo Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography, Foodprint Project, Omnibus contributor) next Thursday, September 8, at Studio-X for the launch of the Field Guide and a related exhibition. Find more information here.

Also during the exhibition, sound artist Kevin Allen will be demoing his exploration of what he calls “the secret lives of material objects” with his ongoing project Sonic Geologic, cataloguing the acoustic conductivity of infrastructure such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway. Other artists and musicians have already tried their hand at similar “Aeolian harp” phenomena, from Alex Metcalf’s Tree Listening to David Byrne’s Playing the Building. Bridges, a new project from sound engineer Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink, asks eight well-known experimental musicians to field recordings or four Dutch bridges. What results is a coherent soundscape; in effect “the bridge becomes an instrument played by the city revealing hidden harmonies within the built environment.” Preview and purchase Bridges here.

BROWN BAG READING SERIES
Part of the Van Alen Institute’s ongoing Brown Bag Reading Series, held every Wednesday at 12:30pm, this week’s talk is on The Power of Pro Bono. John Cary, founder of pioneering nonprofit Public Architecture and a Senior Advisor to Next American City, will discuss the national impact of pro bono work in public-interest design. More info over at VAI.

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Photo credits from left to right: Kyle R. Brooks; Steven Yavanian; Frank Guittard; Jason A. Tax.

Be sure to join us on July 8th for the latest in the Architectural League’s Conversations on New York series of public events. This one features former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff, who set in motion many of the most significant urban projects of the past decade, from the Olympic Bid to congestion pricing to PLANYC 2030. Doctoroff will be in conversation with Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker. (Thursday, July 8 | 7:00 p.m. | The Great Hall, The Cooper Union | 7 East 7th Street | 1.5 CEUs).

And that’s not all that’s going on next week. On July 7th, there are two stimulating panel discussions to choose from. Up in East Harlem, a panel discussion and tour of Tapestry, the new mixed-use, green building, will highlight affordable housing and sustainable design. If you’re more up for a debate on what housing in 2050 will look like, the Forum for Urban Design is hosting a moderated discussion of their own. With the American population projected to grow by another 100 million by then, you can listen to two men with very differing opinions talk about how they think the American urban and suburban landscape will have adapted by then.

Speaking of ideas about the future, Crains, in honor of their 25th anniversary, reached out to a variety of New Yorkers from all disciplines and has come up with 25 ideas to create a better, future New York City. These ideas include topics familiar to Omnibus readers, such as how to rethink Governors Island, how to develop the local food chain, and how deal with New York’s traffic.

Back on May 3rd, ground broke on the Via Verde project in the South Bronx, a new mixed-use development that will include a variety of living environments for a multitude of income levels, and is also slated to certified LEED gold upon completion. The project will also help the city get to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of an additional 165,000 affordable housing units by 2014. Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary for HUD was at the ground-breaking ceremony, was recently interviewed by Architectural Record to discuss the effects of the stimulus package on affordable housing, and the role that architects have in reshaping urban communities. With $13.6 billion in stimulus funds allocated to HUD, that money has been critical to the continued construction of multi-family homes, and both HUD and architects have an unique opportunity to create a new sustainable model for lower-income communities.

The former Domino Sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront has long been the source of contention within the neighborhood regarding future plans for the abandoned site. This past Tuesday, the City Council gave its support for the $1.4 billion development plan to turn the site into a 2,000 unit residential development. With this approval, the project is expected to gain final approval from the City Planning Commission next month. 660 of the units will be for lower income and working class families, and the Community Preservation Corporation, the developer for the site, conceded to reducing the height of the two tallest buildings (although the total number of units will remain the same), and will keep the main refinery building and the 40 foot tall Domino sign intact. Shuttle buses to the nearest subway stop will also be provided, but with the large number of parking spots that are planned for, many fear that the development will not encourage sustainable living in any regard, and have a negative impact on the surrounding community.

Making Policy Public, a program of The Center for Urban Pedagogy, has released their latest poster, “I Got Arrested! Now What?,” the sixth in the series that explores complex public policy through graphic design; past topics have included street vendors and predatory equity. This one deals with the juvenile justice system, following “Chris” from his arrest through trial in court, explaining each phase of the process and even giving important tips.

Image by Iwan Baan via Fast Company

The Summer Warm Up begins this Saturday at P.S 1, featuring Pole Dance by SO-IL, winner’s of the Young Architects Program. Constructed of a large mesh net set on a 16′x16′ grid of metal poles, bungee cords connected to the poles allow visitors to manipulate the net and the yoga balls atop the net. Perhaps the most interactive (and fun!) of the past few installations, you can also manipulate the sound of the poles or watch real-time visualizations of the installation from its own website.

That sounds like a great way to kick off what for many New Yorkers is a three-day weekend. Fireworks are along the Hudson River again this year. Below, a time-lapse video of last year’s display on the Hudson:

NYC Time Lapse July 4th, 2009 from BoB Coon on Vimeo.

If you’re staying in the city, take advantage of the summer weather, and check out Time Out’s guide to the long weekend. And for those that want to stay in Brooklyn, there are a few patriotic events there as well, including a bar crawl in Greenpoint that culminates in a “Most Patriotic” costume competition.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

I met Robinson during a panel discussion on mortgage-backed securitization in February of 2009. In one of the darker moments of the financial crisis and one of the brighter early moments in the Obama presidency, she and I both attended a conference at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy with an optimistic title, “A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Transforming America’s Housing Policy.” With support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, the Furman Center had convened a heavy-hitting roster of housing policymakers who drew connections between the need to rethink housing policy and the need to reform our education, energy and transportation systems. As I listened to experts characterize these as exclusively social issues, I wondered about the conspicuous absence of spatial thinkers. The assembled panelists did not cite the work of designers in their analysis of America’s land use patterns and housing supply. And very few designers were in the room to avail themselves of the incredible resource the conference presented: a bunch of creative people, committed to social justice, putting their minds together to envision new approaches to a national problem that vexes urbanists and students of the built environment in particular.

Maybe architects, designers and planners don’t need to become experts in every new idea about how to address issues of homeownership, displacement, debt and risk. But too often, the most innovative of these ideas fail to infiltrate the architectural conversation about how to stabilize our neighborhoods and, crucially, how to maintain their intrinsic diversity. ArtHome’s approach not only develops new tools for neighborhood stabilization, but it also reminds us why diversity and creativity are worth supporting in the first place. -C.S.

Draft cover for the Homebuyer Handbook, part of ArtHome's Low Income Artist Home-buying, Foreclosure Prevention and Loan Qualification Education Initiative – in partnership with the New York Mortgage Coalition. Graphic design: Glen Cummings