This Has Become My Town (NORCs of New York Revisited, Part Two)

In two conversations, five years apart, residents of a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community reflect on the ups and downs of aging in place in New York City.

This Has Become My Town (NORCs of New York Revisited, Part One)

A decade ago, Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities seemed like a really good idea. How are they doing now?

Shelf Life

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.

Migrating Forms

Immigrant architects and builders transformed New York's working-class housing, once a symbol of despair, into a stock of dignified dwellings — their aspirations etched into the ornamented exteriors of the city’s iconic tenements.

Homebound

"Homes for the aged” have long negotiated between keeping elders safe and keeping them connected to their communities. As the COVID-19 pandemic threatens senior care facilities across the country, the story of one Manhattan nursing home holds lessons for balancing "home" and "institution" during times of duress, and far after the worst is over.

Dispatches

What People Need and What the Stock Provides

Sarah Watson of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council talks about crafting policy at the intersection of public health and private home, and the urgency to build and adapt dwellings that reflect how New Yorkers live — alone or together.

Shelf Life

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.

Digital Frictions

Disruption at the Doorstep

Facial recognition. Tenant screening platforms. Biometric databases. A new set of digital products seeks to disrupt the real estate industry. But these technologies are fast becoming weaponized against a familiar target of housing discrimination: working-class tenants of color.

To Stop Displacement, Disclose the Data!

For more than half a century, real estate data has played a crucial role in struggles against housing discrimination and dispossession. But what information is needed now in the face of changing forms of speculation?

Digital Frictions

Latchkey Living

An indicator species in vinyl and metal, the streetside lockbox signals the rise of a short-term city.