The dearth of affordable housing in New York City and the need to find solutions to the difficult issue form the heart of “Policy and Design for Housing: Lessons of the Urban Development Corporation 1968–1975,” a new exhibit at AIA New York Chapter’s Center for Architecture. The program features the Urban Development Corporation’s housing programs for people of limited incomes and probes how affordable housing can still be built today. The opening program on June 10 features speakers from the original UDC staff and Frank Braconi of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York. A full-day symposium at The Graduate Center, CUNY, follows on June 11.

Housing subsidies are expiring and few replacement programs are being created, notes Rick Bell, FAIA, AIA New York Chapter executive director. In response, a concerned group of architects, planners, policy makers, public advocates, and environmental psychologists will take “a look back to look forward” by presenting an evaluation of the housing produced by the New York State Urban Development Corporation. The UDC launched innovative housing programs in 1968 and began a process of developing qualitative standards for housing and the practice of creating mixed-income housing wherever it was needed. UDC built 33,000 units of housing and three new communities, which still are in existence today. The UDC model can still be a prototype for other states and for the nation.

The exhibit—developed in programs in partnership with The Architectural League; CCNY School of Architecture; The Graduate Center, CUNY; Pratt Graduate Center for Planning; and Syracuse University School of Architecture—will use plans and photographs developed by teams of graduate architecture students from Syracuse University and Environmental Psychology PhD candidates from CUNY to sample a variety of housing types. The housing types include urban and suburban, mixed income, high-rise and low-rise, varying densities, and with various building materials and technologies. The students have completed on-site post evaluations of nine representative projects. The outcomes of their interviews demonstrate the residents’ general satisfaction with their own apartments as well as with the overall environment. Current photography shows how the buildings and public spaces look three decades later.

“Housing remains a pressing need for New Yorkers. The exhibition and its related programs will help indicate how affordable housing can be built today,” Bell says.

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