TOPIC
Documents
Property of the Pandemic
From face masks to diaries, institutions are collecting artifacts from daily life under COVID-19. One itinerant museum has preserved letters from landlords to tenants for posterity.
Co-Op Collectibles
A cookbook. A windmill blade. A bilingual demolition manual. Beyond the city’s stock of resident-controlled, low-income co-ops, the remarkable history of New York’s self-help housing movement lives on in the archives of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.
A Non-Exhaustive Taxonomy of Tools of Data-Driven Policing
A huge range of emergent technologies give police new ways to gather data and surveil. What's on the market?
Call for Proposals: Urban Wild Writer Residency
We seek a writer to explore and interpret the contemporary urban landscape where highways meet gas wells, herons, and kayakers.
What Can Architects Do?
In the thorny thicket of housing problems, from cost to supply to quality, what roles can architects play? Architects Susanne Schindler, Jared Della Valle, and Deborah Gans offer possibilities.
Housing Court
A housing court case can make the difference between safe at home and out on the street. Jenny Laurie of Housing Court Answers explains how it works and what throws the scales of housing justice out of balance.
Community Land Trusts
These days, “CLT” is a watchword for affordable housing and anti-displacement activists nationwide, including the residents and organizers behind a South Bronx initiative that’s building steam.
Illegal Hotels
Like many companies in the “sharing economy,” Airbnb prides itself on “disrupting” the traditional marketplace — but at what cost to New York’s affordable housing?
Property Taxes
Confusing, reviled, unfair, arcane — and important. Explore the labyrinthine system of property taxes.
Development
For the season's ninth and final Housing Brass Tacks discussion, two developers — one for-profit, one not-for-proft — laid out the nitty-gritty of building affordable housing.
What Do You Avoid? Where Do You Belong?
Theater-makers, natives, and newcomers draw mental maps of how they navigate comfort and discomfort in a rapidly changing city.
Public Housing Transformed
Catherine Fennell and Crystal Palmer, two authorities on Chicago's public housing transformation, probed the problematic mythos of public housing—from the "failure" of tower complexes to the virtues of mixed-income redevelopment.
NYCHA
In our seventh Brass Tacks discussion, Rasmia Kirmani-Frye, President of the Fund for Public Housing, leveled with us on public housing’s unique role in the city and the challenges NYCHA must face.
Design and Advocacy in the South Bronx
Nandini Bagchee shares her students' work to forge an equal exchange with activists fighting for community space in the South Bronx, in a studio where designers became advocates and advocates became designers.
Beyond Shelter
In the latest Brass Tacks discussion, representatives from Coalition for the Homeless and Picture the Homeless considered homelessness as a symptom of our housing crisis and efforts to create permanent housing solutions.
Fair Housing for All?
Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, explained the ins and outs of proving and pursuing housing discrimination.
Discrimination, Documented
Excerpts from three documentary films, screened at the first Housing Brass Tacks film night, tackle how inequality is inscribed in the housing landscape.
The Money
This time on Housing Brass Tacks: Where does the money come from, and what’s it used for? Mark Willis, the Senior Policy Fellow at NYU’s Furman Center, takes us through the structure of affordable housing finance.
Affordability
Hunter College scholar Matthew Lasner lays out the history of the fight to make housing affordable: from zoning codes to co-ops, it's always been hard-won.