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Assignment Question

Is there a future of decreased scarcity in housing and if so how can we begin to imagine it?

What role does the past century of housing policy play in this? And emerging factors such as renewable energy?

What is Innovation in housing. Describe where it is possible and where it is already happening or could happen. Housing policy as we know it today is often administered at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Our seminar is seeking to open a discussion of housing as a constituent of a wide-ranging network of development means. From energy to ethnicity, from banking securities to homes; from geographic distribution to city and regional structures. We have been opening paths where we believe innovation could occur and where forces align that could ignite change and new potentials for housing and for people.

The paper for this course has as its major topic a question of where innovation would be possible and how you would characterize it and in effect give some shape to that space. In the form of a speculative paper, we are seeking proposals for how you’d imagine a future housing landscape and one where more people are more fully able to realize a stable home environment. It also assumes that most of the systems that have underpinned public and affordable housing as we know them are facing both positive changes in the form of new sources of wealth/energy but also that they are under political duress after 75 years of contestation. A portion of the course is based on historical analysis: the formation of public housing, the tenants of its organization and in many ways, it’s almost constant state of negotiation and survival. In this light, we are seeking to imagine a future of something that despite its massive presence has never existed in an idealized state. A paper that takes on historical forms of housing policy is welcome especially if you want to cast this as a zone where innovation relies on a careful reading of history.

In light of the Unites States housing legislation that frequently saw government intervention in housing markets as un-fair completion how would you cast a future role for government or for housing markets who are concerned with providing housing to lower income households. Households that are not doing well in the markets? It is possible to also begin with this threshold moment: our moment.

What role could or would new technologies play or more precisely what technologies can converge to offer innovation and change? What might be idealized as a great path forward? Or what is being shaped now and needs our attention? Smart Cities, new forms of transit and mobility – there are key terms emerging and markets that need study beyond the often-direct goals for implementation. Can new forms of mobility alter suburban development and thus affordability? Will new domestic energy supply affordability?

Federal Housing Policy is national in scope and per capita often in measure. What is possible at what scale?

Would you see future innovation at the scale of a house, a suburb or a neighborhood — at the level of a user and a product?

The paper should offer a zone of inquiry and the background to understand the place and the technologies at hand in your ideas. It should then offer a path to see where change is possible and how you imagine that change being not only possible but critical. What is its effect for whom?

If this takes the form of a project we are seeking drawings, data and design that shows your intentions and that in effect answer the same questions as above (who is it for, how would it work, why is it possible and critical. The paper should be no less then 2000 words excluding footnotes. Precise historical references and information is critical – that is a careful use of information to enable your future speculations. A project should take the form of design and would need to be proposed and framed individually. Historical work on Housing 1. Public Housing: The transformation of public housing “hard units” under HOPE VI and the entrepreneurial aspects of how housing agencies trade, acquire and renovate housing stock has changed in the past two decades and in particular since the Clinton Administration. Smaller agencies such as the Missoula Montana Housing Authority had sold its full housing stock and acquired existing apartment units/buildings to enable the use of Section 8 vouchers (and to expand the available apartment stock).

The Bridgeport Housing Authority (CT) had been engaged in a long process of trading properties with the city to both decentralize and de-concentrate it public housing stock, but also to seek better land for development (for the city and the agency). Other case studies from El Paso to Jersey City are small but samples of a larger change in how public housing works. These examples point to a larger question that would be fruitful to research carefully: what is the scope of change in this regard and how do the legal and financial mechanism that enable this operate? Most critically how do they reflect and impact the social and political goals of public housing today. 2. Before HOPE VI: The advent of Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) initiated not just a change in the development means for affordable and/or public housing but also altered the literal mechanics of design and construction (the architecture). LIHTC established as part of the United States tax code in 1982 created a funding stream for housing by way of a revenue deferral—the federal government supplants direct expenditure on housing by way of tax credits. LIHTC:

Design is no longer idealized or administered by a public housing agency as owner, operator but instead by way of non-profit entities that correlate and administer funding streams that must satisfy multiple investment objective and criteria prior and perhaps more critically than housing itself. That is the 15 years annuity of the funds, the duration of regulatory compliance with HUD and other guidelines. Cost: Affordable housing realized with LIHTC funds is often more expensive to realize than market rate or speculative housing due to the complexity and multiple funding streams. Soft costs are generally seen as higher and legal or management costs rise. Is there an effect on the product and its social goals? How is architecture and planning altered in this equation? Syndication: With the IRS as a Housing Agency by way of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits what are the effects and trading practices of LIHTC and of syndication markets. 3. Mixed income and the agents of change: Both the Quality Housing and Responsibility Act and HOPE VI have figured significantly in public housing in the past two decade. The results are overtly and directly spatial.

QHWRA had overtly spatial language—HOPE VI was overtly material in altering physical housing developments. Both at their outset were taken as a weakening of original public housing goals but they quickly (in architectural circles) were taken as cultural battles over architectural style. If taken what can be done to create more refined versions of spatial goals in how policy is written. 4. Voucher programs in housing equity and rent: in the 1990’s and early 2000’s development work in affordable housing focused on voucher programs designed to abet purchase and ownership of housing. Voucher programs as made available nationally but particularly in Houston were implemented to disaggregate larger sums of monies into funds in the form of household/vouchers. A household would receive a voucher to abet rent or ownership. As an example: QHWRA helped increase the reliance on voucher systems to provide equity or rent to low-income households. In relying on vouchers as a mode disaggregating large sums of federal monies in the form of assistance to individual households low-income and public housing was realized more in the manner of normative speculative housing. In short, it meant that the very mechanics and materiality of low-income housing changed but so to the professional engagement of architects—the normative building practices are less reliant on architects and our role is diminished dramatically. One could say that New Urbanism was abetted not by a shift in cultural taste but by a side effect of a political goal to disaggregate housing funding and its allocation—New Urbanism can be realized within the normative practices of construction that we use today in speculative housing.

The example takes some unpacking but its offered to point to a way in which schools today could ideally find ways to be specific and precise in how they take on other fields (other forms of agency and power) and how we see their architectural consequence. With these histories now more historically understood what can we say of their scope and more so wider scale or economic footprint? Who did they help? Where? 5. Foreclosure: the new American Housing landscape: In raw numbers the foreclosure crisis was and remains staggering. More than 15,000,000 homes entered foreclosure proceeding since 2007 with more than 5,000,000 having been repossessed (REO) or auction by lenders—this is approximately 11 times the number of hard unit public housing units built since 1937. Working with the Museum of Modern Art as well as within courses at Columbia the issues of foreclosure have been a subject of research and design by Columbia faculty but in the time since the MoMA “Foreclosed” workshops, exhibitions and conferences the overall stability of the housing markets has improved even as it is also a deeply uneven and varied “recovery.”

The discrepancies are both regional and also based in who made the new investments—hedge funds according the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard account for as much as 25,000,000,000 dollars invested in foreclosed houses (more than 200,000 homes purchased by hedge funds). In other areas the recovery is driven by global investment and strong jobs bases. In short the housing recovery would seem to point to not only an uneven gain but also one that has dramatically different stabilities and futures. Aside from better understanding this condition it also is an important question to understand what it holds for opportunities. The issues are immediate in the form of single family houses and private lives but also structural and of a scale that is in effect a new form of mass-rental housing. 6. Globalization and the transformation of United States suburbs: How are suburbs faring in the era of increasing investment in major urban centers and the investment in housing/condominiums in major cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York? How is the affected by or altering what has been an evolving shift of poverty to the suburbs in the United States?

7. Climate change and energy transformation: What are the effects of energy consciousness on public housing today? Or on affordable housing. Investigation should include a look at specifics of design or funding and change but also who is funding change where it does occur. A particular focus on “energy performance contracts” would be relevant as companies take on funding and then financially benefitting from new energy contracts. How does a near century of federal housing policy and its attempts to instigate, provide and incentivize housing for the poor and for lower income households map onto or into the new future of infrastructure, energy and mobility technologies? Do we need fully new means to imagine what affordable and poverty housing means? This seminar has explored the decreased role direct federal expenditures play in lower-income and public housing development in the United States since the advent in the 1980’s of low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC) and other tax based incentives for housing development.

The seminar lectures addressed how changes in funding mechanisms have affected not only the development and design of lower-income and public housing, but also how these changes in means have been perceived and what impact they had on the engagement of planning and architecture practices with issues of poverty and low-income or affordable housing. With a focus on parallel evolutions in architectural design and theory since the 1980’s that have often seemed to neglect housing as a zone of experimentation the seminar will explore how planning and architectural education could do more to produce a counter to the status quo in all forms of housing production.

The goal is to re-imagine architecture and planning capabilities within a discussion of the financial practices as well the political philosophies of these shifts—more accurately within the seeming loss of an ability to critically discuss equity issues that many of the tax incentive practices often seem to dissimulate into market development models. Affordable housing as a product of tax credits, multi-tiered funding sources, and an architectural guise of “fitting in” with the quasi-vernacular of broader status quo developer housing models (and its constituency) has increasingly made it difficult to discuss the deeper meaning of both the political underpinnings of these policy shifts but also the potential of architectural and planning practices to affect the outcome—to enter the debate.