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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