For decades, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design has touted the efficacy of bollards, gates, and cameras in deterring violent acts — with scant evidence. At what cost do we build “defensible space”?

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.

Elizabeth Rush looks at the particular challenges facing public housing authorities in high-risk flood zones and follows a design competition for a stormwater management plan in Jersey City to consider how responsive, site-specific architectural innovation can inform broader strategies for strengthening vulnerable communities.

Brian Loughlin, the chief architect for the Jersey City Housing Authority, takes us on a tour of recent renovations and rehabilitations, demonstrating the architectural innovation and policy acumen required to navigate federal housing programs and create sound homes and neighborhoods.

In the third article in our Typecast series, Brad Fox travels to Staten Island's Todt Hill Houses and reminds us that amid debates on how design and policy can produce environments of opportunity, people are what ultimately make a place.

As the only person to have managed housing authorities for all three of the nation’s largest cities, Joseph Shuldiner, current director of the Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority, has a unique and invaluable perspective on what it takes to make public housing work.

Sarika Bansal investigates how local traditions of advocacy, a history of community tensions, and the chronic underfunding of public housing inform residents' opposition to a controversial new development proposal at Smith Houses.

In a recent design studio set in the context of the public housing system, Andrew Bernheimer and David Leven challenged Parsons students to confront the environmental, social, municipal, and architectural demands of creating housing in New York City.

Typecast is a long-term Architectural League study into architectural typologies that begins with a closer look at five "towers-in-the-park," one in each borough of New York City.

In the second in a series of profiles of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts, Mercedes Kraus looks at how a cultural community has flourished by leveraging its legacy of artistic production in the face of intensifying real estate pressure and outside influence and interest.