 Hi. I'm Cynthia Smith, the curator of By the People, Designing a Better America. Can everybody hear me? Oh, good, good. The exhibition that's currently on display both on the first floor and the third floors of the museum. It's on now until February 26, 2017, and if you've not had an opportunity to see it, please do. It includes 60 designs from around the United States that address complex issues of social and spatial inequities in urban, suburban, and rural communities. So some of these responses, design responses, range and scale from entire cities like Detroit and Los Angeles to a mobile health app for expectant mothers. So there's a whole range of designs to explore. So I really wanted to thank everyone for coming tonight, and I'm very happy you're here at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum, where the only museum in the U.S. devoted exclusively to design. The talk this evening is the first of several. We have scheduled while the exhibition is on view. The next Designing Resilience takes place November 10. So if you're in town, please sign up for that one. I'd like to take a moment right now to thank our sponsors of By the People. It was made possible by the generosity of the Ford Foundation, IBM, along with additional support provided by Elizabeth and Lee Ainsley, Dutch Bank, Gensler, the Lillie Außenfoss Foundation, the Rudin Family Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Autodesk, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Many thanks. We couldn't put these exhibitions or these panels on without that generous support. Tonight I'm delighted to have two leaders in the field of affordable housing. I first heard Roseanne Haggerty discuss her work when she accepted the Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism from the Rockefeller Foundation, a very prestigious honor. And I was not surprised when it was announced that she was the winner of the 2015 Design Mind National Design Award that Cooper Hewitt oversees. As Roseanne has been a pioneer and an innovator in the development of supportive housing and research-based practices that are designed to end homelessness. She is the founder and the president of Community Solutions, an organization that assists communities throughout the United States in solving the complex problem facing our most vulnerable citizens. I met David Baker for the first time at Bakeworks, a cafe staffed by formerly homeless residents and located on the ground floor of the striking Richardson apartments, a mixed affordable housing complex that DBA designed for the Hayes Valley neighborhood in San Francisco. It's exemplary type of project that DBA designed Baker Architects works on. Over the past 30 years David and his firm has designed and built nearly 6,000 affordable housing units. He is renowned for exceptional housing, innovative site strategies, designing for density, and integrating new construction into the public realm. Tonight we'll have Roseanne present her project that's included in the exhibition for approximately 20 minutes. David will talk about the nine principles that are also highlighted in the exhibition. And then we'll open it up, we'll have a moderated conversation, and then we'll open it up to question and answer at the end. So I'm very excited to hear more in depth about these two quite amazing design strategies that both David and Roseanne will present tonight. So the first is Roseanne. Well, thank you very much for the invitation to be here tonight and congratulations. And thanks to the Cooper-Uit for putting on this wonderful show and Cynthia for your great work on it. And it's a great pleasure to be here with David, whose work I've admired for a long time. I have to confess to feeling inordinately optimistic today on a day that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And if there's any, like, better vindication of the power of the imagination to enable us to see the world differently, truly anything can happen if Dylan has the Nobel in Literature. And I think the notion that reimagining public housing and actually recreating it is right up there with one of these kind of necessary, compelling ideas. Because I'll be speaking about our submission here that's so nicely featured upstairs about our superblock reimagination and retrofit strategy for public housing. And what it is essentially is a way of thinking about public housing and its original intention, which is frankly a really good and necessary idea in our society. The idea that we need to make public investments in good quality, affordable housing so that everyone has a basic standard of living. And what I hope to illustrate in my remarks are that the failures of design and management that resulted from in bad environments that we associate with public housing don't in any way diminish the necessity of public housing and the possibilities of public housing. And what I hope to really touch on and leave you thinking about is that what has been problematic about public housing are design and management problems that are in fact solvable problems. So organizationally, just to give you a little bit of context for why we got into thinking about this and why we're focused on it now. Our history, as Cynthia mentioned, has been focused on what do we need to do as communities to end homelessness. And our work in Brownsville and public housing is really on the homelessness prevention side of that question. But I say a constant theme in our work over about 25 years is recognizing that sort of despised forms of housing, lodging houses, SROs, boarding homes, public housing. In fact, they represent necessary housing options for low income Americans, for people in any society that we need a whole tier of housing options. And the fact that we have not brought our best design talent historically to providing this kind of housing decently, and we certainly have skimped on the management. In fact, barely attended to the maintaining the quality of this type of housing has really kind of gotten in the way of seeing the necessity of this housing being well designed and well managed and being available. The sad truth is a lot of us, affordable housing advocates historically, have gotten exercised about the poor quality of these affordable housing forms. And what's happened is they've been destroyed and nothing has been created to replace them that actually solves the design and the management problems. And so our work here that I'll be sharing with you is reflecting both that long experience now of helping to take SROs and reinvent them as really high quality, well designed supportive housing that work for formerly homeless and low income working people and artists and take old lodging houses and turn them into really decent affordable short term housing environments. And now looking at public housing as sort of a wrongly disparaged form that can be improved with thoughtful design, with good management, and with an ingredient that we've come to see in our work as absolutely essential, which is with the co-creation participation design thinking of the users at the center of this whole exercise. Like what'll it take to make different types of affordable housing options really work for the people who rely on them, who are living in them already or are hoping to access new kinds of affordable housing options. So the work in Brownsville certainly with public housing fits this long history that we've had in rethinking sort of disparaged and badly executed forms of affordable housing. And what you see here is actually the study that formed the basis of our contribution to the exhibit upstairs, which is the retrofit of one of the six public housing developments in Brownsville. Brownsville is a community in Brooklyn. It's a community of about 90,000. It's quite economically and racially segregated from the rest of New York City. It's a neighborhood with amazingly rich culture and many, many assets, but where employment rates are about twice the rate of the rest of New York City's where crime and long-term poverty are pretty normative. My colleagues and I, and most especially the residents we work with, we're really making a commitment to stop ourselves from talking a lot about the problems facing Brownsville because this is really a conversation about the assets and the possibilities and what can be done if we reimagine a core asset in the neighborhood, which is its 10,000 units of public housing, the largest concentration of public housing in one neighborhood in the United States. So this exercise began once we were working in Brownsville for a few years, essentially organizing residents, organizing other not-for-profits and government agencies to really work together to improve public services and improve the conditions that Brownsville residents said were most important to their quality of life improving. And no matter where we turned, you really couldn't escape from the presence of public housing and the challenges that just spilled out through the whole neighborhood of poor management, poor health conditions, and an environment that just so badly needs rethinking. And so we just realized we couldn't see this kind of transformational change in Brownsville without there being transformational change in public housing. And in probing this question, realized that the country, not just Brownsville, needs another set of ideas around public housing beyond the displace and demolish. And we set out to rethink, could you preserve and improve public housing with the design participation of residents? So the quick history of public housing in Brownsville dates to the 1940s. Brownsville was settled really in the early part of the last century, a lot of tenement construction happening in the 1920s. And this is one of the last tenements, in fact, on the site that became Tilden Houses. Our first director of our Brownsville partnership program in Brownsville actually grew up on that block in one of those tenements. And would describe how he knew, or he said, I might actually have been related to someone who lived on every floor of his building. And so it was a very thick sort of interconnected social world that was displaced when these buildings were demolished so that public housing could be created there. And at the time, the tenements were thought, you know, judged to be slums and substandard. But when they were replaced, they were replaced, and you can see in this slide here, in a way that separated the blocks that, you know, my colleague Greg and his friends and family lived on, replaced those kind of more intimate blocks with these super blocks and actually de-densified the neighborhood pretty profoundly. Not only did people get displaced and moved around and family groups disrupted and those kind of informal ties that, you know, lead to work and all sorts of social support, but one of the things that happened when these blocks were changed into these, you know, seemingly pristine super blocks is all the small businesses were displaced too and with them the jobs. And so, you know, older residents of Brownsville will talk about, you know, through the 1950s, still it was the village and then as each of these big public housing projects was built, more of the fabric was just torn up and dispersed. And so, our idea really as we set out on like, how do you rethink public housing in a way that, you know, appreciates it as, you know, the reality that's there. You know, there's no going back to the tenements, but how do we think about public housing and the fact that there's so much of it in Brownsville and it's been somewhere between poorly maintained and okay enough. So, you know, New York City, unlike other cities, has never had to demolish its public housing because of, you know, the abandonment or poor quality to that degree. But neither are these units, as residents will tell you, in the sufficient condition. There's a multi-billion dollar backlog and maintenance repairs for NYCHA housing across the city. But so what we started with, looking for ideas around rethinking public housing, we started with the super block itself and with a source of ideas that has really been a guidepost in our work in Brownsville, which is Death and Life of Great American Cities in the chapter Jane Jacobs wrote on salvaging the projects. And, you know, we think that that blueprint is actually a pretty meaningful one to test. And essentially, Jacobs said that it was the disruption of those old street grids that presented one of the very problematic and enduring challenges to sort of a healthy community flourishing in public housing. And so an idea that we've essentially organized around and going to meet with residents of the neighborhood was the idea taken from Jacobs of reweaving those public housing developments back into the neighborhood street grid. And with a series of laneways, you know, again following the principle of no displacement and no demolition. And so Jacobs not only said the key is reweaving the blocks back into the surrounding street grid, but also concentrating on the common spaces and the connective spaces. She wrote about elevators and making them safe and kind of making the public areas, the stairwells, the lobbies, the surrounding plazas in public housing bringing more supervision and kind of natural flow and natural supervision, not just policing, but kind of community oversight to those spaces. And so those themes being in the background and a principle that we really appreciated in her work, which is there's a lot of sunk cost here. Let's make the best of it. And in fact, New York City looked at what it would cost to replace public housing. It's really prohibitive. So I think, you know, we need a solution that's around making these buildings work. And so we set off from there. And interestingly, when we started meeting with residents, you know, we would hear stories and found pictures to match of the older residents talking about how when the public housing buildings opened, you know, the open spaces were well tended, kind of like Jane Jacobs' point, you know, like if there are people using public spaces and feel safe and welcome in them, you know, the feel of the place is different. And in fact, there used to be garden clubs and, you know, ways that residents could use the property surrounding their buildings. If you visit them now, they're all fenced off and people have no access to that open space. There were common rooms built into the buildings, which over time were shut down, closed off, became supervision problems. You know, we're taken over by the police. We're taken over by gangs. You know, common laundromats were considered to be too hard to maintain by the housing authority, so they were shut down. And so you basically have had this erosion of common space or ways for people to be kind of participating in the oversight of their neighborhood. And this gives you just kind of a general perspective on the neighborhood. We're focusing, and we have focused in this particular project on Tilden houses, which is surrounded by the dots here. But it's adjacent to Brownsville houses, Van Dyke houses, Langston News houses, Seth Lowe houses, Howard houses. Altogether, 6,000 units in just about eight super blocks. And that probably about 20 to 25,000 people. And so here's the existing reality. And this is a particular building we focused on to do the thought experiment and to really process what a different single building could look like in addition to what a reimagined super block could look like. And so 265 Livonia Avenue is right as you get to Brownsville and get off the number three train. It was built as part of Tilden Developments, which is 998 units, opened in 1958 in their eight towers. This is just to, you know, I think the picture speaks for itself. No attended lobby, the stairwells, you know, very unwelcoming, the elevator broken a lot of the time. Another bit of inspiration and where we started the conversation with residents was showing this wonderful, and probably many of you are familiar with it, and quite inspired project outside Paris, which is a public housing tower that looked kind of crazily like the Tilden buildings before it was reclad. This is public housing that basically was reimagined in the way we were inviting Brownsville residents to think, you know, beyond what they could see. And the basic theme here in addition to improving livability and was improving energy utilization as the way to finance some of the needed repairs. And so with this building kind of being our icon for like, look what could be possible. They figured it out in Europe. We convened a series of focus groups and undertook a big survey project with Tilden residents. And what was really exciting about this whole kind of user-informed design process was just, it wasn't just my colleagues and me sitting down talking to residents about what they liked about their existing housing, what needed to be improved. We got the technical experts in the room with them, colleagues from Terrapin Bright Green and Atelier 10 who tend to help actually think through, you know, what people were saying and what could be possible from a technical standpoint. And again, the value that we surrounded the whole conversation with was no displacement, no demolition. What can we do and what would need to happen to actually set the stage for building a healthier, more integrated, more sustainable community. And so one of the things that is always a challenge when you talk to, I think, anyone about public housing in New York, and I'm sure this is true in other cities, is how do you do the necessary improvements which are so extensive now and deal with the relocation issues. And one of the things, and that's been a big political barrier more than anything else to kind of bringing a new lens to this. Well, the Tilden residents helped figure this out, which is basically never take an entire tower offline, but do one wing at a time and begin building infill housing to sort of along, to define a new street grid along those laneways that would define a more connected block system. Build new infill housing that could be swing space for the retrofit work being undertaken. And so it was important also not just to think about, you know, that there is a way to kind of delve into this that was plausible and actionable. I think it was important that we started with what do you like about your housing. Because, you know, people tend not to hear good things about public housing, but in fact residents like a lot of what their units have to offer. Within their units, very pleased with the space and the unit configuration that, you know, valued their community and their neighbors. The issues that they were raising really were much more about the public spaces, about elevators, about sound attenuation, about air quality throughout the building, about shared systems that were failing, plumbing and HVAC, about the condition of the lobbies, about there being no common space where their children could play on rainy days or where tenants could convene, as one tenant said, when there isn't an emergency just to be neighbors. And so with these insights from residents around infill buildings that could both diversify and increase affordable housing options in the neighborhood and serve temporarily a swing space as buildings were retrofit and realizing that the kind of work that tenants really valued was not, you know, really out of range of a redesign plan that could be affordable. We went to work on some sketches around what new buildings and sites that would be new development sites could look like looking at existing zoning and there is a substantial amount of unbuilt FAR surrounding these public housing blocks as you saw from the de-densification that took place when the tenements were removed. And so the sketches and the kind of technical renderings that we were guided through through this conversation with residents were really about how you reclad, expand public housing, the public housing entrances and shared spaces and lobbies, how you enable commercial and community space to be built along the major thoroughfares. Really ways that are pretty consistent with everything we know about good planning were the kinds of values that residents really supported. The apartment interiors, interestingly, the kinds of changes that are going to be required by code and that tenants really pointed to as important have to do with more insulation, better air quality, upgraded bathrooms because, you know, just constant plumbing and heating worries, better security both front door and all of the common areas, more durable finishes. Again, you know, all things that are very basic and frankly achievable, we said at the end a budget of 100,000 per unit and felt that most of this work could be accomplished for that amount of money. And then in terms of the exterior spaces, the building skin upgrade became a really kind of signature part of how to make this all work from a technical and an energy and a financial perspective. The Paris Tower, the developers will tell you, saved about 60% in energy utilization in its first year after being completed and so the savings resulting from a reclad building to make the building more weathertight, more efficient, also improving air quality through new building systems and just sort of simple things like, you know, more insulation between units are kind of the critical features that both key to how the building can be financed through the energy savings and what tenants required in terms of the quality of life issues that matter to them. And so where we are now is we got to a point with this terrific team of residents and technical experts and financial experts as well where we believe there's certainly a feasible project to happen here that would involve in the prototype phase retrofitting 265 Livonia Avenue, this building on the lower left in Brown and creating a new building, a new companion, new construction infill building that could serve initially as swing space relocation housing while each of those Tilden Towers was retrofit. There's room on the site for a total of 700 new affordable units at different income levels that could also include ground floor retail and community space and better quality open space if you take away those fences and make really usable open space. So there's an awful lot to be gained for residents and for the city, certainly for the neighborhood, if we could pursue this. But because I think the magnitude of the implications here of really getting started with one development, we realized that while I think we have a good handle on the technical feasibility and the financial feasibility, the next task is the political feasibility. And so the step beyond this is meeting with residents of all of those public housing developments to think about how this basic idea could be extended and to involve more and more end users, residents of public housing, in the conversation of reimagining and recreating public housing in Brownsville. Thank you. Hi, I'm David Baker of David Baker Architects. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Hi. And our practice is architecture and urban design, and we've done over 6,000 affordable units throughout the United States, the area and beyond. Our mission is to go beyond buildings to create community, which is hard for architects. We're always thinking of the baseboards and all that great stuff that we love, those aesthetic things. But that's what we try to do. So how do you do that? How do you take a building and design and make community? And how do you foster a community? You don't make it. You foster it. You encourage it. So what we've done is over all this work, we've come up with some ideas, some concepts, and we're featuring nine of them. We're calling it nine ways to build community in affordable housing and fight to share them with you as takeaways. We start out when we design something to think about these, and we try to work them in and remind ourselves. I don't think we ever had a project where all these ideas get in, but the more you can get in, the better it is. So the first one is this concept of reweaving the urban fabric. So that just means to take whatever you're doing. It's a lot, you know, your explanation of the Brownsville. There was this idea that somehow streets were bad, so they combined these things and could have more gardens. And then they found out all the great things that the grid and the urban fabric allowed people to do, which is, you know, the wonderful Jane Jacobs really reminded architecture about. So we want to integrate those things. I'm just going to show you, actually it's a public housing project that we did. It was a rebuild, which NYCHA has so many units. You have so much housing authority, housing in New York that you don't have that option in California. We do, and so it's an advantage. So this is the existing project. You can see it was built actually as military housing. Tasafuranga is named after a naval battle at the United States lost in the Pacific. And it was the classic thing. I think there were great dreams of these houses sitting in a garden. And so they put these kind of barracks sitting in a parking lot and then fenced it. And so it wasn't clear. I think maybe the fences were to keep the bad people from the outside from getting in or, you know, was it to keep the bad people inside? It's not really clear. In any case, it wasn't successful. And so what we did is we just took this about a seven and a half acre site and there's all kinds of really nice features that were existing. There's a school, there's a library, there's a community center, there's a park. And we reintegrated them and also opened up the grid again so you could get through. There was a situation where you had to jump a fence and run past guard dogs and then climb another fence and then you could get to school. Not ideal. So one thing is it just, you know, streets are good things. And so this is the interface between the neighborhood and the new housing and we put residential entries on the ground level. And then the interior of the block, this one was actually walking in the street. She's walking on a speed table. It was interesting because we did all this traffic calming and Google Maps was sending these 65 foot trailer trucks through the site and they couldn't get through. And I was there once and this truck had kind of couldn't make the corner and they had the clipboard where they went out and had the truck driver fill in this insurance information because he ran over some stormwater soil in the process. But anyway, they changed Google Maps and now people drive much more slowly. It's really interesting. They are out in the neighborhood on the White Street and they drive really fast and they enter and they start going slower and then people sort of, they feel comfortable in the streets. And then we also replace streets with pedestrian paths. So the important thing I think is that the grid, the great thing about grids and not every place has grids and you don't have to do a grid but in the United States we were very attached to them since that's the way our cities are laid out. It doesn't have to be for motor-driven vehicles. This is a pedestrian street with the kids riding their bicycles down it but it's still, it's consistent. So this is before and after. You can see the gated before and the reintegrated after. Interestingly enough the management folks, the people are going to manage the building because California is going to a private public model so they took management of housing authority projects out of the government and put them in the hands of non-profits. Well they said, we're going to have to build a fence because we want to keep the bad people out. But our allies were actually the housing authority police who said, we're a little older, the fences don't really work. When we're chasing some kid they climb over the fences. We don't really want to climb over fences. We can't. And we'd much rather walk at a reasonable pace and radio the squad car and cut them off. And there's actually been a 25% reduction in crime. So then the next big idea is to make big moves and this is just something when you're doing architecture and housing which is very, it's got a lot of code requirements. It's of necessity, repetitive. You need to stack things. It's hard to. I mean big can do that stuff but it's actually more expensive to do that. But making big moves. So we do some sort of volumetric signature design and then that allows us to make an interesting building form and allows us to use materials that are more straight forward such as cement plaster or hardy board. They're one of my favorite materials. Very wonderful green and incredibly inexpensive material and very durable. So this is an example. This is housing for formerly homeless seniors in Oakland and there's a west facing elevation. There's actually little windows behind those sunshades and we did this whole, I don't know if anybody remembers who Victor Olgay was but he has this whole thing about facing windows south and north and not east and west for environmental reasons. But we wanted to have windows but it has this quite striking elevation and differentiates the building by orientation. This is called Valentina. This is family affordable housing in Sacramento in a neighborhood called Alkali Flats which was not named by the real estate industry. And this is actually, this is vinyl siding. It's kind of something you'd put on a ranch house in Ohio and we just used more of it and made a form that's really expressive. This is an arterial, it's a very busy arterial. It's a light rail stop as well. And so it has some identity and meaning as you go by it which I think is, I think that's super important in cities. So this is a design that we're just about to start construction on. So this is in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco which is a historic district. This is Taylor and Eddie and we are, since we're modern architects and this is not the 19th century, we want to do something that doesn't mimic a very nice building in the foreground so it's brick but it's rotated and if you can see the twist there, which is actually a fairly straightforward thing to do in a concrete building and then the slot lines up and addresses the cornice height of the neighboring SRO. So next is, a little goes a long way and this is, you know, a lot of times you go through this. It's a wonderful expression. I know the architects will know it. It's called value engineering otherwise known as taking all the good stuff out. But, you know, what we did is at some point we decided to make a case for leaving some in. So this is a little goes a long way. So this is a great material and we meet Fritz Patel, who's a principal. Actually this is one of his projects and we put Rhine Zinc in. And fortunately it was the recession so, you know, everybody was so hungry that this building came in a million dollars under budget. Very nice. And nobody ever took the Rhine Zinc out, which is fantastic. But we went and we put it in there and the idea is that you take a portion of the building and like 20 percent and you say, let's make 20 percent of it really good and make the other 80 percent not cheap but straightforward, you know, and use these materials that have less. Because really if you make it all with great materials, you know, or with expensive materials and it's like a tort, it's like a Viennese tort. You know, you don't want a city made out of Viennese torts. So it's like adding a little bit of spice to a dish. You know, you don't want to, well maybe I do sometimes but you don't want to add too many hot peppers. So this is that building turned into a corner and another idea of adding some percentage of goodness is these are these sunshades which we just figured out cost about $3,500 a window. So it's, you know, but it's on a very inexpensive cement plaster, stucco base and it has the other thing it's great to do is make these things a win-win so that we don't have air conditioning in this building. They're very small units and this really helps those units, keeps them from overheating because we have a lot of sun in San Francisco before Carl the Fog hits. And then across the street we did a building that's actually very interesting because it's micro units but this is not affordable housing. It has a component, inclusionary housing. It's 12% affordable and the rest is unaffordable. Affordable to someone. And it's a very similar unit to the formerly homeless housing which is Richardson, about 325 square foot unit. The difference is that the cabinets are much nicer. And so on the left of this image is a cement plaster and actually that's hardy board. That's our very fancy version of hardy board and contractors think hardy board is cheap so even though it looks really expensive they never complain about it because it's just some guy nailing this stuff up and then painting it with house paint. But then on the right is a local brick that's been glazed with five different colors different shades of black by a local artisan ceramic tile company that's in San Jose. So it gets this wonderful rich look and we curved it and that's where we put all our effort and cost. And these are all in the Octavia Boulevard area. These are all former freeway pylons. So you can imagine each one of these buildings where hundreds of people lived was basically a foundation and a post for elevated freeway. Pretty amazing transformation. And then this is again, partially, we have an inclusionary and it actually ended up doing new housing with 50% of it being affordable by requiring inclusionary at 15% and then reserving a certain number of sites for affordable only projects. And this is again the Rhine Zinc and then cement plaster combined. So the next thing is activating the edges. I hope you're not holding up the sign that says my time is up yet. Activate the edges and that's just that number of people that live on the ground. Some day we'll be flying around in drones but right now we walk down the street and we grew up historically on the savannah so we have this horizontal vision. So this is a place where you can get a fantastic $23 hamburger and it's really good. And if you ask people how tall is the building above it, frequently they don't have any idea whether it's a high rise or a two-story building because they look at the first 20 foot. So the idea is that you find something to put on the ground level. It's not a parking garage or a transformer room and you already make the transformer room doors as narrow as you can. This is a project we just finished called Petro 1010 and it's a big enough project so it has 90 affordable units and then 400 unaffordable again rentals. And we were required to do a commercial edge to protect an existing commercial businesses. So they have a thing in San Francisco called a PDR which is planning distribution and repair. But what's really neat is that that could be an art school running a gallery. So in CCA California College of Arts leased this whole strip 30 foot deep and about 500 foot long and have a gallery there with these fantastic shows. So that was a real... It's kind of build it and they will come. When anybody complains, New York obviously, people build active ground floors but most places they go, oh, it'll never lease. What are we going to do when it doesn't lease? If you make that space down there, people will find all these fantastic uses for it. But the important thing is to keep going with it and not give up and that requires a real relentless commitment to not give up. Say, oh, that's the back of the building. We'll just make that five minutes. Oh, boy. We'll just make that grills for the parking garage. So a while back, we did an article for SPUR which is a local think tank where I've been on the board and we just said, hey, how about we line up the building code with the planning code and if you do a really great ground floor, you get five more foot of height so you don't have to take out a level of housing or something above, a story above. So that's what we did. So this is actually an affordable, formerly homeless SRO or micro unit project and that's where Cynthia Smith and I met that's a place where they have make pizza and beer and wine license and train formerly homeless in restaurant work and then on the right-hand side, that's a Vietnamese immigrant who did his own interior, fantastic interior and his very successful business. And then you also have residential, you think of, we just showed the planning department, you know, Brooklyn Brownstone stoop. Well, this is our version. That's the Corten stoop. And, you know, so you just activate the street with people with porosity. Okay, be welcoming. You want to have a great interface, a great door. So that door there is we call it the KDoors. We try to put them in virtually every project. They've been, most of them have been made by one guy named Paco Prieto, but it makes this really a statement because nobody's silly enough to make a door that looks like that. Paco actually thought it up. He said, well, you know, it's structurally easier. He said, that's easier for me to build a door and go, okay, Paco, you've got the job. So this is, you know, Gracious Entry Away. And again, there's a bit of the kind of art community shield thing that signifies that front door. And then there is the door going through to the interior, the interior agriculture area. And then these are the kids. These are formerly homeless families and kids do a lot better in school than they're not living in a car. Cultivating connection. You see little numbers there. The one is a classroom and two is the tot lot and three is the laundry room and four is the community room and five is a little terrace outside the community room and six is the community garden. So you put, there's actually the tot lot which consists of these precast gorillas having a food fight and there's the urban agriculture committee of this affordable family housing looking at their kale. But so it's just, this is another dumb idea which has recently been copied by Google where they don't let people work from home because they want them to run into each other and talk. And so you just put all that stuff in proximity and then people bump into each other and they get to know each other. Mailboxes are a really good thing to do with that. And this is looking out on that urban agriculture from the community room. And there's a common table there and a barbecue so you can, you know, barbecue your eggplants. And that's looking down. This is, we put in ornamental plants but they, with a part of it being urban food producing and they've gradually pulled that up and they've actually pulled up some and made the children's play area. That's another thing that's super important. This is an interior that building with the Xbox lounge and then the homework computer area and the washing machine laundry all in proximity which is great because we can watch their kids and help them with their homework. And light and circulation. That just means that you bring light and air into your circulation. And in California we have the great factor of being able to not have to have a window because, you know, we have winter but it's not like your winter. I grew up in Michigan so I know about winter. But so this is a diagram of building we did with open air corridors. This shows this, we call them green stairs. And this makes a really great front door icon illuminated at night. But you see this is what it looks like during the day where it's, this is affordable family housing in West Sacramento in a complete new district in a flood plain that they raised up about nine foot. And then that stair leads up to this open air circulation. This is bridges connecting the two sides of the building. And then kind of all these things work together. This is proximity. This is our tot lot, required tot lot. And this, which is a climbing wall for kids and that orange stuff is actually soft fall surface. And then that's, there's no soft fall surface because this isn't an official tot lot. So we didn't have to follow the code. This is just a, you know, kids actually don't fall on concrete dangerous things. And they're more fun. So that kid is, yeah. And then we're doing this actually in Charleston. I don't know if you know about the Charleston single house, but they used to circulate completely on the exterior of houses in Charleston, only in Charleston, not even in Savannah. They call them single houses because the corridors run only on one side. This is affordable senior housing. So we got our circulation in this 12 foot corridor, but it's actually a porch so that in the idea is it seniors, you know, hang out. They are interested. They look at other people. They can look down at the garden and they can get cross ventilation through these kind of shotgun one bedrooms that we designed. It was really great working in Charleston because they're self-funded. They take no government money. So I said, what codes do we have to follow? Cause there's like 50 codes that all contradict each other. Like the federal government has like three ADAs. It's really cool. And they're contradictory. And Billy, Billy goes, you know, you just have, I just have to like it. We don't take any money from anybody. Pretty interesting. I went, okay, that's fun. So getting personal. This is just the idea that you make your mark here. It is a resident gardening on the roof of this building. Current house. So this is in the tender line, very successful. They expanded that urban agricultural program to double it and they've made it actually more communal because people, I'll give you the dark underside as people when they were sharing those tubs and why they were sharing the tubs shows how much demand there was. There were two families per tub. Then they started building fences in the middle of the tubs. And I came out there and there was like six foot high fences. And I'm like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. But so they got a garden coordinator and now they're being communal. Works much better. So you offer space for residents to make their mark. And this is just a little door space. My time is up. You can see they put their stuff out there. This is a cultural one where you have a, this is an African mudcloth. And again, just to bring the community into it, this African-American community. And so you can make, you know, apartments are really boring because you have to have the windows in the same spot and they're all above each other. So the circulation that's exposed here in the entry into that courtyard, it's all bright and nice. This is a formerly homeless seniors are doing an art class, which is good. But then we provide a place for them to display their art afterwards. And this, in these vitrines in the lobby, which is really nice. And then art for all, last one. So art is a good thing. So, you know, it's great in many ways. It's core to the human experience. And it's really hard to get into affordable housing because there's no budget for it. So, but it can provide really great things like wayfinding. This is creative growth. It's developmentally disabled artists who are fantastic. And then you can see, they're digitally licensed. And this is, these are four lobbies in these, those buildings. So as you go up, you know, it gives you a certain character when you get off the elevator, you can see your painting. This was, we borrowed from public art on a public parking garage. And then we, if you see on the right, you can see a window fritting. That's a blow up of one part of it because that's a mosaic mural. And that's from the inside. So, and actually you can kind of tell. And particularly after I tell you that this is true, you can see that it's mosaic. But that's, it was a way of bringing it and forming it. Okay, last one. This is the project we did in Union City. And you've seen some slides of this building. But so we had to do public art. And this wonderful muralist named Mona Karen said, oh, I'm going to paint a wildflower. And I said, you sure that's a wildflower? And she said, but I'm going to make it really big. So then, you know, weeds and flowers are similar. So that there she is painting it. And there's Mona when it's done. So this is a fantastic icon. It really defines this building. But the really interesting part of this was the roots that she did. She did that. She got the community together in the building. This is a building where they speak about 11 languages or more than 11 languages. Actually people from the area around. It's in a new public transit new town. So she had 120 people come to this meeting and talk about their vision. This is a kid who would, I always get choked up at this one, sorry, who you think would be tagging it. But he's helping paint it. And then these are the folks. So it's really important when you're writing in Sanskrit or Hindi or you really don't want to do it yourself. You want to have somebody who actually can do it so you don't write the wrong thing. And then, you know, these people painted welcome in all these languages, the roots. And then they, sorry. So there are those kids. But then this is Elias and he's, by this vision the community had. And there's a little mini tower there and a mini weed. It's one of those things where it keeps going in. And so that was their vision of this organic gardens and wind generation and this future that all these immigrants have together. So there you go. Thank you very much. That was so incredible to see both of those presentations. Thank you so much. And yeah, to be so moved by your, by the response to the community, just really quite wonderful. And I think this is a really good dialogue about what's possible. What you've been able to, what I'm so impressed with David and your work is how you realize so much of this in this multitude of ways. And then the hope that this Tilden prototype has and the dialogue that kind of like what's been done in California and how that might be able to be applied here in New York City if we had the political will to do that. So both of these examples from my perspective point to how design, whether it's retrofitting and reweaving a housing authority, super blocks into the neighborhood, or designing these new mixed use, mixed income, inclusive housing complexes can enrich an entire city. And I think many people, and I know when I looked at the Tilden house and the super block retrofit, there was a discussion about this being a prototype that it could be then used for the, I forget how many units are in the rest of the city. There's a total of 178,000 NYCHA units. Right. I mean, that's incredible. That has such impact. And then I know, David, you talk a lot about reweaving and you have very large complexes reweaving into the entire city. Can both of you expand on how both of your strategies, your approaches can benefit the entire city? Whether it's New York City, San Francisco, or Charleston, or wherever. I'll just say a few words and then let David jump in. Because this point you mentioned, Cynthia, with 178,000 NYCHA units and the population of public housing residents in New York alone, the latest quote I saw exceeds the population of the city of Denver, and that is, those are a lot of our fellow citizens and the consequences we know of good housing. You can just imagine what the consequences of bad or no housing are, but the consequences of good housing are improved health, improved employment participation, the kinds of connectivity and social bonds that you saw so beautifully illustrated in David's slides. And so I think we want that for each other. We want everyone in our city to be able to contribute all they have and every child to flourish. And when housing conditions are a barrier to that, it's I think a matter for all of us to take as a concern, especially when I think the ideas are actually available that would allow us to move forward and just keep working to get it right, but not addressing the situation under invested in housing and families and individuals who have no housing at all. We pay the price in all sorts of ways. I mean, financially, we've been able, the Royal Way has been able to quantify and elevated healthcare costs and elevated remedial education costs and the loss of contribution of so many people in terms of the workforce and their creative gifts. Have you had any indication that this proposal might move forward? Well, when we started this, we engaged both NYCHA and HPD in the core thinking about what we are doing and I think that there is real interest in, could this be done? I think that NYCHA has done a very fine job of wrestling with a lot of hard problems of its financial instability, of dealing with rebuilding many units that were affected by Superstorm Sandy, so they have a lot on their plate. I think we have work to do in terms of making clear that there is the level of resident enthusiasm and buy-in that would, I think, ameliorate some of the anxieties about how this would be received by residents. Yeah, I think that San Francisco and New York, I guess it has recently maybe taken the title as the most expensive city to rent from New York, though I think that's not true. I think that's kind of made up a little bit since anybody looking for an apartment in New York probably doesn't feel it's a really easy place either. But every situation is also really different. San Francisco, for instance, has based essentially, I don't know if privatized is the correct word, because they've basically taken the housing authority and they've made it a landowner underlying, just an underlying landowner, and all the management and the whole business is now managed by nonprofits. New York is blessed with all this housing. It's also, it becomes really hard to do anything because it's such a huge task, and I don't know what percentage, if I have 10% or 5% as much housing. So they were able to go through and really, and also I think the stock wasn't as good. I mean, the NYCHA stock is really great. Maybe it's a little ill-intentioned in some of it and not keeping the active edges. Well, it's these six to 22-story brick towers as opposed to the low-rise, post-World War II kind of. Those things were just, you know, they aren't really savable there, so they're really kind of little concrete huts. No density. But the great news about these cities, these major cities, is that they have this fantastic, desirable culture, and that's why they're so expensive. I mean, because everybody wants to live here. And so the challenge is finding a way to provide housing in all levels and providing enough of it because the housing authority tenants can kind of become sort of nimbies in their own way because, you know, like their parking lot or something like that. It's always, I mean, I'm just saying that people get invested in a certain way and then it's a matter of convincing them of something new. And the new is always, particularly I think in a lot of these areas where there's been a parade of new ideas which have kind of successively don't work or are uncurried through with enough vigor to actually succeed. So it's hard to convince people that the next new idea is going to work. It's interesting. You've been in your presentation, you talked about inclusionary housing. Do you think that's the direction we need to go? I would like to hear from both of you. I don't know. It's a very interesting balance because obviously people who are building new housing that's market rate don't want to do it because, you know, it's very expensive for them. So it's basically a tax on new housing. So in that sense, it's not a good idea. It does spread out affordable housing. I think it's one of the tools. The big issue is how do you adjust it so it doesn't kill production of market rate housing? I'm a fan. It's been very effective in New York and in many places that we've examined it. We've become very fond of the notion of thinking in terms of housing systems, not just housing developments because one of the things that I think really bears attention in a lot of high-cost cities in particular is how we allocate the affordable housing that we build, how we make sure that, you know, everything that we are subsidizing in any way that there's some intention behind how we allocate it. We now have a situation in New York, maybe there's something similar in San Francisco, David, where it's not unusual for more than 60,000 people to apply for one lottery for a handful of affordable units in a mixed-income building. Now, that's nuts. I mean, you know, I don't think that if the city has an affordable housing crisis, then I think it's like, you know, European cities in Israel, you know, they have provisions for really looking at how affordable housing gets allocated and kind of having some design on that. You know, like people who, you know, are homeless or people who are in health crises and, you know, just having some rigor to the market and how our subsidies are directed and places that do that, you know, end up having more for everybody. Yeah, I think there has been an issue and inclusionary is great. It's a tax on a small group. It would be really great. And I think San Francisco is pretty good about voting to tax itself with bonds as a whole because the idea that you can do it without a large investment is, it doesn't happen. So that's really key. And then, you know, what's happening in San Francisco is that we tend to be building, you know, the very high-end and we're building for formerly homeless. We did this whole focus on, you know, this solution to homelessness is housing, which is really great. But then there's all these people who are, you know, impoverished $50,000 a year families, which, you know, and they can't stay in the city and there's basically nothing being built for them. So it's very, it's difficult without adequate resources to solve even one problem, much less all the issues. So, you know, it's, that's, I think we'll solve that if Trump gets elected, he's just gonna wave his hand. He's not, we're not gonna pay taxes and we'll have more money to build affordable housing. If nobody pays taxes. Sorry. It's okay. I'm sure you guys are all Trump supporters here. You know, in San Francisco, there was one, two guys that walked into a bar with Trump t-shirts and it's kind of a biker bar and they just said, we won't serve you, leave. And they literally threw them on the street. So that's, and everyone, well, what's the problem? Of course they didn't get served. I saw, sorry. I have to say, non-committal, I work for the Smithsonian Institution and we're federal. So I can't say anything. So this is interesting. We've been talking about homelessness and housing. Rosanne, can you explain Community Solutions 100,000 homes projects and this whole strategy of housing first and why it might be a better approach to treating the root causes of homelessness? Well, our 100,000 homes campaign was a national effort that went from 2010 to 2014 and was focused on this notion of how do we create functional housing systems that know by name those people who are homeless and prioritize those with the greatest vulnerabilities who would not ever be able to find housing on their own and we mobilized ultimately 186 communities including San Francisco and New York to essentially align their resources a lot more smartly and to look at the process by which overwhelmed, poor, vulnerable people actually get housing. The starting point was, in a word or a phrase, a mess everywhere and the 100,000 homes campaign was successful in actually seeding this idea that we have to have a rigorous process for helping people get into housing. That's not enough to have it. It's how people access it that is often broken and housing first, as Cynthia mentioned, is a notion that we found is really the key to ending homelessness once it's occurred which is housing has to, and getting people reconnected to a stable home has to proceed any other activity that may be beneficial to those individuals or families. Like many people will need employment support or mental health or substance abuse treatment but as you can just imagine sitting here are you more likely to be able to manage your health or your mental health problems while you're on the street or if you have a home to go to. And so housing first is about cutting through all of those notions about what's good for people to the basic place of stability first and happily all of these communities learning to align their resources and strip out a lot of the friction in the process resulted in more than 105,000 long-term homeless people being housed in four years, mainly by communities realizing how to do the job of housing people better. That housing is a process, not just a product. David, we talked briefly earlier today about some of the efforts you've had been doing with workshops locally in San Francisco on homelessness. Can you talk a little bit about that? This will be my last question then we'll open up to the audience. Well, my partner and I have a community a small space for big ideas called Storefront Lab storefrontlab.org if you want to visit and we're doing a symposium on homelessness and I'm kind of in the business of providing housing first but it's been really eye-opening and we have a situation I'm not going to spend a long time talking about why New York is different state laws here that have caused certain things to happen but what they're realizing in San Francisco is housing first is incredibly important but they have to start thinking of the shelter system as not a temporary punitive dysfunctional thing but as a more long-term thing that is healing and has sufficient robustness so that people aren't living on the streets. It's been super interesting and there's no business to motivation because this isn't our field but really wonderful so I'm going to just do a little plug here you can get nine ways pins now what we do is you could send in or you could talk to me but we ask that you give a donation per pin to the Coalition on Homelessness and there's a web link so if anybody's interested in this beautiful not all nine of them because that would be overboard but if you would like to do that I'd love to do that and also that we have webcasts of these symposiums and they've been like teachings that's why I said teachings because I didn't understand the issues around the emergency shelter system which is still super important we have to do a lot more on all fronts thank you so I think we have time now to open up questions for the audience hi I am currently working with can you just say your name and your affiliation yes my name is Bahia I'm just very intrigued by affordable housing but also in community engagement I'm also an architecture student I am currently working with a set of youth all over the city engaging in not only transforming themselves but also transforming their communities that they're working with especially working with 12 to 15 year olds and I'm noticing this incredible capacity of these youth to make change in their neighborhoods so my question is and both of you mentioned community engagement tremendously so I'm just wondering like especially Ms. Haggerty how much are the youth involved in the product of for instance in Brownsville and then also Mr. Baker you were so moved by these youth at the very end of your presentation how are they shaping so much of your designs well the whole structure of our work in Brownsville has been about building a team of other organizations and government agencies and residents working together and one of our extraordinary partners is a center for coordination and specifically the Brownsville Community Justice Center and they have a very extensive youth initiative and it's really the young people who they've mobilized who are sort of the ground troops who are doing a lot of the improvement work in the neighborhood and in fact as we look to this next phase of organizing and design surets around public housing transformation the intention is to train groups of these young people as facilitators of the meetings that was happening organically in some of the Tilden conversations like who showed up 15 and 16 year olds but we realized that there's this capacity that you spoke to and in fact another of our partners sort of a wonderful organization that we've helped to incubate called Made in Brownsville a young man from Brownsville went off, got his architecture degree came back and is now training young people in Brownsville and design skills he has a huge role to play helping to fashion this new vision of the community and develop the capability of young people to actually help the leaders in rethinking the design of the neighborhood I would say that in the past there was very little community engagement we were working with nonprofits and they really wanted to streamline the process and that recently and particularly when you approach an existing community and there's much more working on a couple of projects now where they're leaving the community in place and that becomes very sophisticated and difficult and you really this is going to be pretty much the same people living there when you're done that I think that community engagement is super important and it's been interesting the kids actually do better understanding the architectural drawings and the adults really amazed we were in Asheville I think she was about 12 years old and she completely got sight sections and it was wonderful so I think that it's coming in the future it doesn't make it easier but it may it can make it easier because people are less stressed and less likely to not support it it's a worthwhile investment to talk to people first yes any other questions hi my name is Cam Bellamy and I'm with Camp Hill Hudson a Camp Hill community in the small city of Hudson New York population about 7,000 I work with adults with developmental disabilities and I'm particularly interested in inclusive housing models and I wonder if either of you have experience in public private partnerships or and or for profit not for profit partnerships and being able to develop mixed use and inclusive housing we have historically done a lot of that building supportive housing that was always a combination of individuals with coming from homelessness many with disabilities and low income working people, artist housing we found that it really is in kind of the design and the staffing and the management that dictates whether it's a successful community it's not like anything can be combined with the right intention and kind of stewardship in terms of public private projects in fact we're involved in one right now we're about to open a supportive housing building in Washington DC where we have partnered with a for profit developer and so historically we did them all as not for profits but it's certainly an option that's available and we've assisted groups in New Orleans for instance in doing public private arrangements. I think that there's always the mixing of cultures and income levels and I think one of the things that's happening now which is not so good is part of the housing first model there's been a tendency to do buildings that are all very super low income and the committees we've worked with where there was much more of a mix from no money to people making $70,000 $80,000 a year all in one building the conventional wisdom was it wouldn't work at all and turned out to be really fantastic and it's a much more resilient community because if you get people who are really all super impoverished and really desperate and coming off the streets it's not like it can't succeed but it's a very different vibe. I also think people really long for normalcy and to be integrated into kind of mainstream and buildings that are so segregated they don't contribute as much as they could. It's hard though because you're trying to address a problem where you have thousands of people on the waiting list and the impacts are so different because we do the range of housing and some say, oh I had dinner over at this nice apartment and then somebody else says, well my legs didn't get amputated because I'm not living on the streets anymore. I mean literally at that level people walking again and their lives being saved so you think, well really we should be focusing on saving lives not having this really healthy community but I think there's a danger that I think has happened in the past of concentrating too much on one problem and then you have it then it fails. So it's not as resilient. Okay. Hi I'm Lynn Elizabeth from New Village Press and I just wanted to add a comment for the architecture student in the back that the city of Boulder and the University of Colorado at Boulder has been focusing for several years now on engaging the youth in the planning and design process so they're good folks to contact. That's all. Thanks. Any other questions? Mike Sweeney I'm a parent of a developmentally disabled son. We're working with Cam and Camp Hill. I was curious about the political process because at the end of the day politics kind of about money. I think the woman in the middle can talk about New York. I'm not really looking to get into like, you know, one guy's bad, one guy's good but how do you create momentum behind what you're trying to do? I mean obviously it's go out and you reach out to the community but at some point you also have to push a few buttons so if you can maybe talk about that. Well we certainly had a lot of experience in our development work over many years of needing to win over local residents and key stakeholders. The I guess my advice is just be really thorough and respectful. I've been quite amazed over the years how most people can be brought around. The I think we've always aired on what sounds like something counterintuitive on the side of just being very open and meeting with anyone who would meet with us and kind of lavishly transparent as far as the intentions and who's going to live there and you know it's sometimes it takes an awful long time. We've had I'd say 90% of the time the projects are going to go forward in the way we proposed with maybe some small modifications or often things like having the real honest conversation about what's going to happen when things go wrong because we'll tell like we're good at this, we have thousands of units to point to but people often fear and the legitimate questions are what's going to happen when things go wrong and just being open about that you know the most painful projects were ones where we agreed to change sites but the project got built or we read the politics in a way that made it clear that a different organization might succeed instead of us so we supported a different organization but you know we've never had a situation in all that time where if you stick with the respectful, honest, open conversation people don't ultimately you know find a way to work with you. So I think we have time for just one short quick question. Hi, my name is Henry. I'm finishing on my last year of architecture undergrad. I think Ms. Haggerty touched on this more in terms of affordable housing in sort of dense urban environments but for you Mr. Baker I was wondering have you thought about how your system might scale for say places with hyper dense urban environments like Hong Kong or Singapore because one of the luxuries of LA of course is that is rather sprawling so you can have these wonderful developments like for more intimate. We like that idea. San Francisco thinks of itself as dense and I guess it is you know second to New York but certainly not on the Hong Kong level. It's an interesting question of what's too dense. People will say that and you know there's that the place in Hong Kong that got torn down the Kowloon City was that too dense? It was a fantastic experiment and kind of do-it-yourself urbanism. So I think these things are fascinating and it's just so wonderful to learn so that we proceed on that level. So a wonderful conversation thank you both for being here and November 10th is our next public program so please sign up. Thank you. Thanks so much.