Public Housing

Public housing models in the U.S. are becoming more community-oriented and taking varying demographics into account during the design process. Engagement with the street, the neighborhood, and social services are creating new design typologies.

March 29, 2013 - Architectural Record

Using funds made available by savings captured through administrative reforms and other sources, New York's beleaguered Housing Authority has made considerable progress in tackling one of its most pressing problems - its backlog of maintenance jobs.

March 12, 2013 - Crain's New York Business

With the demolition of notorious high-rise housing projects such as Cabrini-Green over the last decade and a half, Chicago became a model for a new approach to public housing. A new study tracks former high-rise residents to see how they've fared.

March 11, 2013 - Chicago Tribune

While some agree that the plan has financial merit, others fear the social costs of mixing incomes in public housing neighborhoods. The authority's chairman sees it as a win-win.

March 5, 2013 - City Limits

Jessica Garrison reports on the ambitious $600 million "makeover" planned for the Jordan Downs housing project. The phased transformation, which allows any existing resident "in good standing" to stay, will be the largest such effort in the U.S.

February 11, 2013 - Los Angeles Times

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee took drastic measures to initiate a turnaround of the city's troubled Housing Authority on Friday by replacing all but one member of the city's Housing Authority Commission.

February 10, 2013 - San Francisco Chronicle

Could Vienna's century of experience in creating housing that is both affordable and attractive offers lessons for how the U.S. can address its growing affordability crisis? In the Austrian capital, more regulation, not less, leads to cheaper rents.

February 1, 2013 - Governing

In an expose that many have been clamoring for since the days immediately following Sandy when stories of people stranded in NYC's public housing came to light, the Times explores how NYCHA and the city were unprepared for the storm's aftermath.

December 10, 2012 - The New York Times

As part of a series of editorials outlining the priorities President Obama should tackle in his second term, The New York Times looks at how the federal government could help support the increasing number of American's in need of housing assistance.

December 6, 2012 - The New York Times

Recently a destination for luxury development, New York's waterfront has historically been home to the city's poor. When Sandy inundated these vulnerable populations, it "looked like a perverse stroke of urban planning," writes Jonathan Mahler.

December 4, 2012 - The New York Times

The New York City Housing Authority is facing scrutiny after residents went almost a month without power, Nicole Anderson reports.

November 25, 2012 - The Architect's Newspaper

Matt Chaban profiles John Rhea, NYC Housing Authority Chairman, and his efforts to improve the city's last bastion of affordable apartments.

September 6, 2012 - The New York Observer

Continuing its 'Cities Project' and its focus on roads and motor vehicles, NPR goes to Syracuse, N.Y. to report on a 1.4 mile stretch of elevated Interstate 81 that runs through the heart of the city, and efforts to tear it down, maybe.

July 26, 2012 - NPR:All Things Considered

Singapore has a robust public housing program, which comes from the government operating 80% of the housing stock. Neal Peirce spells out how the system works.

July 4, 2012 - The Citistates Group

Architect Ray Gindroz says that a perfect storm of factors - economic change, crushing policy decisions, and over-reaching ambition - brought about the disaster of public housing in the U.S. like Pruitt-Igoe.

June 25, 2012 - Better! Cities & Towns

Elizabeth A. Harris explores the New York City Housing Authority's extensive underoccupied public housing dilemma and how attempts at resolving the issue delicately are failing to address the problem.

March 13, 2012 - The New York Times

Jonathan Massey pens an essay in the journal Places, in which he probes the implications of homeownership as the vehicle by which the microeconomics of household finance and the macroeconomics of a globalized economy are mediated.

February 18, 2012 - Places

Michael Kimmelman, after visiting the Penn South housing cooperative in Manhattan and reflecting on the new film "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth", questions the role that design has in determining success or failure for tower in the park housing type.

January 26, 2012 - The New York Times

Preservationists say Lathrop Homes should be preserved, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) says it should be "transformed", but what do the residents think?

January 13, 2012 - Chicago Tribune

Low-income residents of the Upper 9th Ward in New Orleans have lived alongside a potentially lethal legacy of federal policy decisions -- and on top of a 95-acre municipal dump.

January 5, 2012 - City Limits