 Welcome, everyone, to this year's special urban design evening lecture. It's really a great pleasure tonight to welcome back Roseanne Haggerty, an alumnus of the school who has, over the past two decades, single-handedly changed the landscape of homelessness, of housing, and of real estate by opening up new possibilities for how we think of approach and design for our most vulnerable populations. In many ways, Roseanne's work and trajectory represents all that we aspire here to hear at GSEP. If we understand this school as one that is committed to exploring and supporting new modes of knowledge, new forms of practice, and especially new ways to engage across all of the disciplines of the built environment, then Roseanne is certainly a one-of-a-kind role model and an inspiration. Having demonstrated throughout her practice how to turn our unique skills as synthesizers, whether we are architects, urban designers, or real estate developers, to think across silos, disciplinary, professional, governmental, or institutional, and, quote, connect the dots, as she has often said, to find very precisely where and how to intervene, at what scale, and towards what end. In 1990, Roseanne founded Common Ground in New York, a nonprofit social services organization whose motto was radical, housing first. Soon after, the organization, now known as Breaking Ground, became a pioneer in creating more than 5,000 units of housing for the homeless in the city. In 2011, she launched Community Solutions to address the causes leading to homelessness, working with communities across the country. There are many incredible discoveries that Community Solutions has been able to make throughout the initiatives it has launched over the past years. And so I would like to highlight a few that I believe really speak to how far Roseanne has taken design thinking and design intelligence in terms of expanding what it can do and what we can contribute as architects and practitioners of the built environment. The first is this discovery and understanding that knowing the individual name and stories of each homeless person was essential to fighting the increasing number of homeless people in the country. Without the connection between the individual specific scale of one person and the large scale of housing, the city, and its infrastructure, this could not be resolved. The second is how the use of data analytics and data visualization was not only critical to thinking and designing solutions across all of these scales, the individual and the collective, the localized and the national, et cetera, but that rendering the data visible was also about rendering the stories that it told were tangible, that storytelling and humanizing those experiences were essential to mobilizing effort and engagement. And finally for me, Roseanne's practice embodies this critical notion we are trying to grapple with. Whether it is designing for climate change within global urbanization or to address increasing inequality is the idea of designing with uncertainty, the openness to continuously learn, to design processes and feedback loops and engage the world not with the assurance of our expertise, but with the confidence that our ability to draw things together, to think across scales and silos and to render invisible relations visible is a first step towards meaningful action, engagement and knowledge. Roseanne is a MacArthur fellow, Ashoka senior fellow and Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur. She received the Jane Jacobs Medal for new ideas and activism given by the Rockfellow Foundation and was awarded with an honorary doctorate in human letters at Emmanuelle University this year, as well as with an independent sectors, John W. Gartner Leadership Award. Common Ground, her first non-profit endeavor who has received the Rudy Brunner Award for urban excellence, the Peter Drucker Award for non-profit innovation and the World Habitat Award through the United Nations and Building and Social Housing Foundation. And tonight we're also delighted that Kate Orff will give the response, another person who has been teaching us how to design with uncertainty. But first, welcome, Roseanne. Thank you, Amal, and thank you all for being here. It's a real treat to be back at Columbia, at GSAP. And I am really grateful to have a chance here to sort of explore some insights and some discussion topics that have become more and more evident and important to my colleagues and me and to have a chance to socialize some of these insights with you is very helpful to our work at this point. So I've titled my remarks tonight, Housing is a Verb, because I think this is what we're seeing now in many years of work and now working in many parts of this country and internationally has been in some ways a missing piece of the way we've thought about housing for vulnerable people and those for whom finding stable and safe accommodation is going to require the actions of others. And I'm going to organize my remarks tonight around three questions, three themes, three observations. And one is that in the spirit of housing as a verb that we've learned that housing is a process as well as a product and how we design the process matters in terms of whether we have communities where everyone has basic accommodation. Second is the question, and again it's very much about action. Who gets to design the housing and the housing process? And then lastly, how we think in terms of designing community housing systems. And that's obviously a social activity. So to begin, if we're all looking for housing, what do we do? Well, that's very familiar, we go to Craigslist. This is the path we typically follow or we hire a broker. But what if you don't have the resources to do that? Financial, if you're struggling with a disability, if you're dealing with issues of stigma because of past history and institutions of one type or another. And in some ways the fact that how we get access to housing if we can't manage the process on our own, it's kind of no one's job to figure that out when you think of it, people who design housing, people who build housing, people who regulate housing, people with finance housing. But whose job is it to put all the pieces together and make sure all of these different investments and typologies actually align and somehow get matched to the population in ways that don't become this cruel game of musical chairs. And we had to learn this the hard way because even though we'd spent years building supportive housing, and I'll go into more of that. When we started asking ourselves the question from the point of view of the person experiencing homelessness, what does it look like to actually find a home? We mapped our own process. We kind of called it our housing ecosystem and you'll see it's a non-ecosystem. It's basically like shoots and ladders. These all represent steps that a person who's homeless would have to go through to get into a stable home. All sorts of documentation that they would not typically have that none of us would typically have, frankly. Original copies of birth certificates and various government forms. There's this long process of demonstrating your eligibility, proving who you are, proving what your disability is, proving that you're actually homeless, proving that your income, your citizenship, and then none of the housing programs, and I counted recently in New York, there are 11 different housing production and finance programs at HPD, others at HDC, others still at the State Housing and Community Renewal Agency. There are zoning incentives, tax incentives. There are four different rent subsidy programs. There are all of the housing units that already have been built that are owned and managed by NYCHA. There are all of the buildings that have already been built subject to various regulatory agreements that are on turnover or initial occupancy available to homeless or low-income people. Plus, there are the vast resources now at the Department of Homeless Services, somewhere between 1.6 and 2.3 billion dollars a year being spent on homelessness, on responding to it with emergency shelters, plus different rent subsidy programs that are attached to and sending landlords to accept people out of homelessness, plus quite substantial numbers of buildings that are being used for temporary shelters. So when you think of it, that all of these resources aren't connected, but represent our efforts in New York alone to try to fill housing gaps, this kind of picture that was our own reality begins to make more sense, and why having a mindful design of a housing system, of understanding the process of getting someone with low income, with challenging situations, into a stable home is so confounding. Basically, we are living in a world in many places, some of it's changing, where there is absolutely no clear path to housing and how housing is distributed if you require some type of assistance is through waiting lists, lotteries, or other type random events that actually defy an intention of getting everyone in one's community a stable place to live. So, we thought that maybe this was just New York, but when we started working nationally, we actually, with some designers, took this idea of maybe it's the process of housing that needs to be examined, and maybe it needs to be someone's job in a community to actually rationalize this and make it a frictionless for the vulnerable people seeking housing. And this, I think, was from a meeting in Long Beach. And what we did around the country and the communities that we started working with on housing system design is ask everyone who had a piece of the action, whether it's the housing authority, not-for-profit organizations, the VA in the case of veterans who are homeless, people from City Hall, to actually sit down and with these different magnets, imagine what it would take to get a single person out of homelessness. And typically, I think on average, it took about three hours and 20 minutes for these teams to figure it out because no one had actually the whole picture. They knew what their next step or their agency required. These yellow magnets represent moments at which there had to be an exchange of paperwork, of money, and they were complete log jams. And what we added up in various communities was the average length of time, even if you could get through this process, that it would be required for a single homeless individual to get housed. And I think it was 245 days. In some communities much worse, in some communities they just kind of gave up, they realized it was a path to nowhere. And then we asked those same teams to then gave them permission to design what a sane process would look like if your intention really was to optimize your housing resources and have a process that worked for everyone. And the teams could do this in about 10 minutes. It just, you know, it's very intuitive, very logical. And it was basically take out a lot of these steps. What's really important to know. And it was sort of like the need for some kind of coordination and permission to actually solve the problem of optimizing housing. And when we pressed groups about why they couldn't do what they just designed, what we heard over and over again in communities throughout the country was they didn't know, but they thought they just needed permission. And so one of the things that I just want to really implant is this idea that the design tools that at GSAP you're learning, look beyond the individual buildings. This mess is really what explains a lot of what's going on in homelessness in our country and especially what you see in New York, that the process itself is at odds with a result which we would all hope for for each other, that people who are vulnerable and need the assistance of public subsidies or publicly assisted housing of some sort that there's actually a frictionless process. And so once we started understanding that this actually needed to be examined as a principal tool in the work of ending homelessness, it really kind of shifted, frankly, our whole worldview. And with that background about, I hope I've convinced you that we've got process problems and need accountability and good design to understand how to allocate housing and how to make the experience of it sane. Well, it did kind of reframe almost everything we'd worked on to that point. And so I'm gonna go back probably about 10 years from this moment to when I worked on our first big development which was the renovation of the Times Square Hotel which is on the corner of 43rd Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan. And at the time, we took over the building and put together a plan to save it and convert it into a very large 652 unit permanent supportive housing residents. At that time, Times Square itself was a pretty chaotic place. This was in the early 90s, just after I left Columbia. And the building had been built in the early 1920s at a time when there were many SRO, single room occupancy hotels built in Manhattan and in downtown Brooklyn in particular. And you'd find them in many cities built in that era for single individuals, a lot of returning GIs from the First World War. But as people were flocking to cities, this kind of single room with shared baths, very respectable place to live. In fact, you'd find these types of dwellings really running the gamut from a very primitive, like lodging house type arrangement or cubicle hotel on the Bowery up to something that would have been in its prime in 1923 considered a very reasonable first step in housing if you were moving to Manhattan and working in the theater district or in some startup profession. Well, by the time we acquired it, it was in bankruptcy. There were about 2,700 building code violations. It was kind of almost an official disaster. But what we'd seen there was the opportunity to really rethink that old form of housing that had really been discarded at the SRO. New York City had in fact passed legislation over the years to ban the new construction of SROs. It was really kind of written off by quality housing advocates. But we saw at a time there was rising homelessness in New York that there was a real future in rethinking these buildings and adding what was missing, which is essentially good design, accountable management. And for those who needed support, a real firm linkage to the kinds of assistance with health and mental health and employment issues that people would need to get back on their feet. Well, we were fortunate that a whole set of circumstances in some ways not unlike the present moment in New York City and homeless issues. The mayor at the time had announced with rising homelessness a plan to open new shelters, neighborhoods recoiled. And yet in Times Square, we had an interesting set of facts with pretty enlightened business owners and with an activist community board that was troubled by the fact that these building conditions were so poor and there were still about 200 elderly and mentally ill people stranded there and that they needed a plan. And so proposing to turn this into mixed income housing and to address the quality environment deficits with a complete redevelopment of the interior of the building to create efficiency apartments and then along with that space for the social services support and to allocate about half of the units for lower income working people. So have workforce housing mixed with housing for the formerly homeless. We were able to finance this and in some ways it was a simple idea and not surprisingly it worked. I mean frankly there's not a lot that good design and good management kind of accountability doesn't solve. And what happened next was surprising. I mean the project was very popular. People frankly did hold their breath since it was so large and you know there's a sense of will working people be willing to live with people who'd been homeless and frankly good design and good management solves just about everything and good value. We had affordable rents for everyone. But what was problematic about the Times Square which we thought was a great success for several years was what it didn't do. And not long after we'd fully rented up and the building was stabilized and we're breathing a sigh of relief that it worked. It dawned on me that I was still walking past the same homeless individuals living on the streets of Times Square that had been there before the building reopened. And it was the first time that it really dawned on me. Like why did I think this was all gonna sort itself out without some intentionality. And it goes to again this question of system design. We were housers, other not-for-profits ran the outreach teams and we didn't talk much. Our tenants who moved into the Times Square were individuals who were referred by New York City shelters. It really was kind of a first come, first serve situation. You had your application in and you were coming from a shelter and we had a vacant apartment, you were in. And the fact that there seemed to be no correspondence between our creating all of this housing for homeless individuals and the fact that nothing changed on the streets in Times Square. It's funny the stories you begin telling yourself I guess people weren't interested or that maybe it's because we require people to sign leases and never actually spoke to anyone who was homeless on the streets of Times Square to find out why didn't you apply to our building? Until something happened. I got a call from a social worker at Bellevue Hospital who told me she had with her someone who had identified me as her next of kin and I couldn't imagine who that was. Well it turned out it was an elderly woman we used to see regularly in Times Square and who was always very silent but always looked so frail that when I'd see her and most of my colleagues we all stopped to ask her if we could do anything to help. And well lo and behold it was this woman who wanted to move into the Times Square and it was only then when I turned to my colleagues and said do we have a vacancy? Like well we have a waiting list and is this person clean and sober? You know does she have insight into her mental health issues? I'm like we ask those questions? How is that relevant to someone who we actually could pretty much tell without being told by a doctor who was likely to die on the street? Well we realized we had to kind of throw out our own playbook about the process of connecting someone with housing. And when we moved her in she told us straight up that the reason she had never asked for help before or even returned our comments was that we had always asked her about do you need a ride to a shelter? Can we help you with food? We had never offered to a sister in finding a home. And so with that kind of aha that it was really we had failed to match the resource that we had of this quite abundant housing with the needs of people who were clearly stranded on the street in our own neighborhood that really was the moment of reversal. And so I guess just to pause on this insight all of the housing in the world won't solve homelessness if the people who are the most vulnerable are least able to act on their own if we're not taking responsibility for building a system into which good projects fit. That you have to start with the people and then design the projects. And so this notion of housing is a process. We learned in a very challenging way but then we decided we could do something different and my colleague Nadine Malay is here and was part of this project. We realized we had made this kind of blind leap into building housing without really understanding who needed to move into it because we weren't talking to the people who needed to be our co-designers. So we began with just hiring some really thoughtful interns and asking them to go interview every single person living on the streets in Times Square and ask them about their housing preferences. And I remember going to meetings with these really fine people at the outreach teams who would scoff at the idea. People are service resistant. They're there for a reason. They're not willing to go to shelter. Well, I think all but about a dozen people who live between 14th Street and 59th Street, West of Sixth Avenue, all but a dozen people were prepared to sit down, go through a whole interview questionnaire and provide very detailed information about their housing needs. And what was really striking about it was how reasonable and achievable people's aspirations were. No one was asking for a rent stabilized apartment in the best neighborhood in New York. People were saying if I had a place that was clean, safe, no questions asked, private, social workers great, but I'd like to be the one to choose when and where to meet with them. And what we also learned that pretty much blew us away was that people were eager to pay for their housing. People typically had between five and $15 they were willing to spend. But we heard over and over again that there was nothing in the market that would actually meet their income level. And also there are other kind of considerations around paying for accommodation. People could pay one night at a time or possibly a week at a time. They couldn't amass enough money for a down payment on an apartment or even to enter into a lease. And so it was a real revelation about market failure frankly and that really the course of our work has been shaped by this idea of who gets to design and also who can tell us about the processes that we need to have in place to actually see that we have housing available that is designed with actual people in mind. Well, we began working not just as housing developers, not just as housing developers, but as I would say kind of system engineers at that moment and started building pathways for people leaving the street. And it was interesting to discover that at that time in New York you actually weren't considered homeless if you lived on the street because you needed the certification of having been in a shelter. So we had to run around getting affidavits from like the coffee guy. Yeah, that yes, I have seen this individual homeless for continuous nine months and to begin to actually piece together a documentary record that would qualify individuals to live in the government assisted housing that was being built at that time. But we also began understanding and kind of a key moment was when we hired onto our team to lead this effort, someone who had recently left the military because we found that it was almost, it was gonna require a different type of imagination in a different facility with problem solving and data to begin bending the system in a new way. And our colleague Becky who's an intelligence officer in the military. Of course, her first question was like, what's the ground truth? What are we looking at? Who do we know? Where do we find them? Where do we see them? And at that point outreach was a nine to five Monday through Friday activity. Well, Becky and her small team got to know everyone by name, realized that, and this is the first huge insight that again has been transformational, which is that homelessness is just too big a category. There are people experiencing homelessness who've been homeless a day and homeless 30 years. And it's like saying a sickness as though it's all one thing. You can't begin to respond unless you understand like the individual situation and the individual diagnosis. And what's so counterintuitive is we began learning that you solve big problems, the more granular and personal you make them. Because at that time, there were about 55 people on average who would be homeless in Times Square overnight because our teams are working at night. But they found over the course of the first six weeks that only 18 of those individuals were homeless every night. And so they could see that there was this differential pattern. And what we began doing is housing those people and figuring out how to get through that shoots and ladders game and get people into housing. And in the course of three years, we'd set a target of reducing homelessness in Times Square by two thirds and three years. We were able to reduce it by 87% by focusing on the right people who needed the housing intervention and with everyone else giving them the lighter touch help to connect them with resources so that they could in many respects solve their own situation. Well, this idea that we had to move from kind of like the chaos to a streamlined coordinated system was first effective in Times Square. And we began to get inquiries from some real early adopter types in cities around the country who were thinking there's gotta be a better way that in any city, cities are spending a fortune managing homelessness when they were looking, you know, lots of smart people, others think there's gotta be a better way to invest our resources. And in fact, we were able to, with about nine other cities who are interested in working together in another kind of housing as a verb way, learning our way forward together about what it was gonna take to create something that looked like that, a coordinated system. And so after about 10 months of realizing that we could accelerate our learning and our ability to place people in housing, the more in sync we were in sharing goals and kind of stopping doing things that were kind of traditional, but not getting us anywhere, we launched something that, and it was frankly less crazy than it sounds. We had started by then spending a lot of time with people in systems engineering, quality improvement, data analytics, realizing that these were the places where we were finding problem solving tools who could help us move from this to that. And a group that has remained a close partner is the Institute of Healthcare Improvement. And they've brought improvement science into the healthcare field and in fact persuaded us that getting to better outcomes on housing people might look more like a well run Toyota factory than whatever the heck we were doing that was producing this. And so IHI had led an effort called the 100,000 lives campaign to drive the adoption of lifesaving practices that were really about behavior change on the part of people working in hospitals. It wasn't about we're gonna save 100,000 lives because we're all gonna buy expensive new equipment, but no, we're gonna change the way we work. And so we had watched this and realized the power in setting a big collective goal to drive behavior change and to shift people's belief system that homelessness was all about the lack of affordable housing or people not wanting housing. And in fact, it was about broken systems. And so in July, 2010, we launched the 100,000 homes campaign. And we had at that point, I think, gathered about 18 communities who were just ready to say, the issue is the way we're working, not just the availability of housing. And we set a goal of collectively housing 100,000 of the most chronic and vulnerable homeless across the country in four years. And basically set up this massive learning community. And it was interesting when you think about the holy grail being getting to scale. Well, what we discovered is, harnessing teams and communities, training them, putting them together in a movement, accelerating learning and the transfer of practice, teaching new skills, that that's a powerful way to scale an idea as opposed to setting up offices and what ended up being 186 communities around the country. And to fast forward at the end of the four years, communities had housed more than 105,000 long-term vulnerable homeless people, largely with the resources they already had. But by moving from that chaos to a more streamlined system. And what we also discovered was, and had the Urban Institute do an evaluation at the end, was that key characteristics of the most successful communities included having the most robust team. And so this is very, any kind of complex problem solving, as you know, is a team sport. And the team here in homelessness needed to consist of the local elected officials office, the not-for-profit consortium, the housing authority and the VA. And to the extent that those groups were working together in a community, seeing success in the same way, sharing a name, sharing data, and using a triage system that would identify the most vulnerable and long-term homeless by name. They were able to mobilize community resources that they had not even thought of. For instance, we get in the habit of, this individual is homeless. Well, this individual is also possibly elderly or a veteran or someone with cancer or young. And that there are other resources and communities that track different other dimensions of our identity. And once people are like, this is actually this human being with this name and this history. And all of these other resources somehow like, oh, we'd never thought of this before, as long as we had that person trapped in this homelessness identity. And so 100,000 Homes, an amazing success for all of the communities involved. But one thing it didn't do, while it had this powerful catalytic effect in showing communities that it was their own systems and their own processes that were flawed, it didn't actually get close to ending homelessness in any of these 186 communities. So we knew that there needed to be a next chapter and a next until we actually figured that out. And so what we did at the beginning, well, the fall of 2014 to launch at the beginning of 2015 was we put the word out to communities, including those who hadn't participated in 100,000 Homes, that for those who are willing and would be prepared to assemble that team, I described, the chief executive of the municipality or the county or the state in some cases, you could apply as a unit of government, the housing authority or authorities, the VA and the not-for-profit consortium. If you would apply housing first, the idea that it's housing and then whatever a person needs to support their recovery, not you have to achieve housing as a reward. So housing first had to be your practice across the board, that you're willing to collect and share data. Whatever data we collectively discovered we needed and share data, report it and share it with the rest of the team. Use a performance management or triage system so you could actually see where interventions were having an effect and have a feedback loop that all could learn from and then participate generously in a learning community. Well, we had 75 communities signed up and the goal was to actually figure out what it was gonna take to permanently end chronic and veteran homelessness. And so we are about 18 months into that. The basic disciplines and I'd say we've learned something powerful every three months but the basic disciplines are you go to the people. You know that this is again who designs the process and who designs the housing. This is not work that is happening behind desks. It's about linking what's happening with outreach teams, emergency room nurses, at jails, at shelters with what a community's housing policy is around how housing gets allocated. So it was describing back at the Times Square where whoever applied first, well actually what we realized with these communities you need to do is you need to go out and know by name every person who's experiencing homelessness and persuade them to let you help them. It's a complete inversion but you know and you think of so many of the important problems around that outlier group. People who never seem to get what they need in conventional systems. You know what we have learned with communities is if you know people by name and go to them and work with them patiently you can shift a whole system. We also as I mentioned discovered the power of the by name list. Not only for revealing other parts of a person's identity that could lead to helping them find housing but we in the first year of Built for Zero used communities existing data which HUD requires an annual point in time count and so communities began the Built for Zero journey thinking this is the number of people I have to house. Well in about a dozen of our 75 communities they got to December and it housed all the numbers of people they were supposed to house and they still were nowhere near ending chronic and veteran homelessness. So the crisis and the opening there was everyone's data was crappy. That it wasn't good enough. We weren't gonna solve a problem using HUD standards that we needed to basically start thinking about this issue the way you would think about a pandemic. If you were gonna stop Ebola would you just hope to generalize your initiatives? No, you'd have to know by name who you're talking about, where they are, the state of their condition. And so communities were just like you gotta be kidding. We've gotta find a way to collect by name real time data and five communities dropped out at that point but 70 went forward and this is basically where communities were in terms of going from something they thought was impossible in January of 2016 to where we are now and my colleagues were pleased to see that in the new guidance for HUD and the VA, by name lists are there as like you need to be working toward a by name list. It's totally revolutionized the way communities are now thinking about homelessness as the key to actually making progress. So this is what it took to kind of get communities to this data standard. They never imagined they could reach and the data allows them to collect these five points on their monthly dashboard. So communities actually know if they are making progress on the only thing that matters or do you have fewer homeless people this month than last month? And can you account for where people actually have been placed or gone off the radar screen? And so the quality of data is turning out to be a more powerful tool than many things that have been applied to this issue over the years including, I think it's a question mark, many of the different affordable housing programs in that that hasn't solved the problem without the specificity in the insight revealed by person specific data. And this is where we are now about 18 months into the campaign and truly the fact that we're seeing this happening is breathtaking to me and it's these communities doing the work but we have seven of the 70 communities that have now sustainably ended veteran homelessness and they know in real time anyone who's coming back into the system and they have such tightly run housing systems that they can get people rehoused immediately but what we're seeing and to continue on this kind of public health analogy that we're seeing that treatment, prevention, surveillance, it has to be part of an interconnected system when it gets to housing and the fact that any new veteran who becomes homeless communities now have the ability to make that more and more rare to understand what's happening upstream and to rehouse people quickly. Now with chronic homelessness you age into that. Chronically homeless individual is someone who's been homeless continuously for a year and has a disability or has had several episodes over the course of two years so that's a hard zero. We now have three communities that as of August have ended chronic homelessness like they're done. Now they're marching down and anyone who's been homeless six months or more they're housing them next. There are another two communities that just last week got there but we always wait six months to see that they're actually holding it but more than 75,000 people housed many of who were not even known by name at the beginning of 2015 but what's also so powerful is now the expectation has shifted just because of a few Vanguard communities. Now in this movement there's no one saying can't be done and they're like okay what do we have to do and the onus is back on the team, the community for actually organizing their work, their processes, their resources in ways that actually get that last mile accomplished for vulnerable people. So I'm gonna shift now to the other part of the story because housing really does matter. It just has to be within the context of an ecosystem that's actually connecting to people who cannot navigate the housing market on their own and so this notion of what a community housing system could look like and who gets to design it. Well what we've learned in now in many communities where we've had an opportunity to speak to individuals who've been homeless for long periods of time and back to the original research among people living on the streets of Times Square. What we have come to see are maybe the missing pieces of the housing options part of the system are housing that the people who need it if I could summarize it, say is modest, it's accessible, it's well designed and it has the social supports close at hand and when you contrast that with some of the things that designers we get excited about which is new buildings and lovely innovative design what is striking to me and what I can say with no equivocation is that doesn't matter all that much to people who are fighting to get on the basic first and second rung of the housing ladders. What matters are what I mentioned earlier is it safe, is it clean, is it private, can I afford it, can I live in it on my own terms and can it be adjusted to fit my economic circumstances and so we, starting back in our earlier organization at Common Ground, we began experimenting with different housing forms and I would say what they had in common and they're also much needed in just about every high cost housing market where we're working now are different models that create different levels of privacy and affordability and that actually use existing housing more densely and so I'll kind of take you on a bit of a learning journey because these types of housing options really are important in this well organized housing system and we hear over and over again in communities it's for want of this that people can't solve their housing needs on their own. This project, the Andrews, was one of the last remaining Bowery lodging houses and I remember when we were analyzing all of the data and we had a number of design charrettes with individuals who were homeless to kind of articulate and actually do some experimental building around what new housing forms could allow that privacy, cleanliness, no question that asked and very deep affordability like could we actually build something that could be rented for $10 a night? We started thinking that what individuals were telling us and describing to us sounded a lot like a well designed and well run cubicle hotel that this type of housing had existed certainly on the Bowery in New York and in many cities up through the 1950s and then it was pretty systematically closed replaced and frankly a lot of it deserved to be closed or replaced but the basic need it was addressing never went away just did not have been offered in a decent form. So we ended up buying this Andrews hotel, the one right there in the middle, which when we acquired it, it was pretty creepy looking, had about 199 sort of encrusted cubicles like years and years of smoke and it was really just a world unto itself and there were gosh, I think almost 90 men who'd lived there anywhere from a few years to over 20 years still living there and we added three floors to it but before we undertook to renovate the interior of the building, we had a whole design competition that some people in this room participated in and created an opportunity for five of the designs to be developed and implemented. Actually only three of the teams decided to go forward but it basically looks like housing by IKEA but after many kind of sort of hilarious meetings with the building department who had never seen the likes we realized that they could consider the units to be furniture as long as it was designed so that there was shared light and air and ventilation and so in a building that had we renovated it to be conventional housing, we would have been able to fit I think 34 units. We were able to actually create I think 149 and in some ways, I mean from a design standpoint the project was spectacular and the original tenants participated in the design, sure it was really quite a fascinating process but it actually has never operated on a direct night-by-night pay basis. The city of New York kind of swooped in with an operating contract that actually allowed, solved the problem of how to pay for the social services but I think in some ways this is yet an unrealized agenda item. Can we collectively among us build housing that people could actually rent for less than $10 a night and provide something that actually cities always had but just isn't available anymore this very inexpensive, safe housing. Another project that got out this question of how do we use existing housing in a more dense way to actually create more housing opportunities for more people and to go about it with the spirit of what people are asking for, just simplicity, modesty, accessibility. We worked with the Actors Fund of America to take a building that had been in bankruptcy tower on the corner of 59th and 10th and turn what had been built as originally luxury housing but never opened into shared housing for a total of 178 people. There were I think 90 apartments so we were able to house that many more people by taking two, three and four bedroom units and turning them into shared suites where individuals could have a lease to a half a third or a quarter of the unit common space as well as their own bedroom and interestingly we combined and just think again about the scale of this project. The only prototypes we could find were like shared housing among elderly people in Vermont that very homogeneous populations but we combined individuals living with HIV AIDS, the elderly and the working poor who had some tie to the performing arts community and it required really thinking about how you manage, how you mediate kind of roommate arrangements but this project has been a huge success. I think it's been like 22 years but again really changed the way the building was designed and operated internally and created almost twice as many housing opportunities for individuals than if they had been rented as individual family dwelling units. This is an example of a building that Nadine and I worked on. It's the rooftop garden of the Christopher which started off as New York City's initial YMCA residence and I always like to point out that this idea that single people without much money need different forms of housing that are modest, safe, accessible, this is like so not a new idea. The YMCA movement started in I think the mid 19th century and it was the loss of these types of units that have compounded the difficulties people face in dealing with their first step housing needs. This particular building was converted into 40 shared units for young people aging out of foster care or who are already homeless in shared suites and another 107 small efficiency apartments but what's, I think the notable thing to take away is even though this lovely roof garden, modesty, simplicity, affordability, just again responsive to the user and I also wanted to show these two other slides which I think begin to lead us to what are some interesting answers to these questions of how do we create more options within a well-ordered and well-managed and connected housing system. This is actually a project in Helsinki, the Y Foundation which is a group that we've collaborated with a bit. Finland is the only country in Europe that is steadily reducing homelessness and their realization was that they needed to take all of the buildings that they were using as shelter and temporary housing and just turn them into permanent affordable housing for the people who were otherwise in this kind of institutional state. So they undertook a program of renovating buildings that had been used in a congregate fashion and they have seen this precipitous drop in homelessness. In fact, their executive director has an interesting theory that shelters help to create homelessness. It actually is distorting of the housing market and that we need to get to a place and again it sounds like lessons we can learn from the healthcare system where you're doing everything you can to keep people out of an emergency room or to quickly return them to their home and that you really want to shrink your institutional infrastructure. And so there are about 8,000 I think former shelter beds in buildings like these institutional ones that have now been turned into housing. And again, modest, affordable, well-managed and this is the type of housing that is being looked to especially in Europe as a kind of a bit of a beacon for what other European countries can do. And then I just thought that this is actually a pretty interesting thing for us to ponder that this question that Nadine and I worked on for so long about how do we create something like the Andrews Hotel something modest, private, inexpensive, kind of operate and pay on your own terms that this has moved into the market now that people on Wall Street can live it. We live and pay more than certainly the people that we had in mind in designing but that these actually are design problems and I think that I saw some of their slides and I'm like, it looks like some of the images we had and we had our competition for the Andrews but that as designers there's this really interesting convergence happening I think is what we've seen what the modest, private, affordable housing on your own terms options that homeless people have been telling us about for years. Now people on Wall Street are seeking them too. Well, in closing, I just wanna give you a bit of a sense of where we think the future can move here in communities that are really grappling with this issue of building accountable, trackable data driven housing systems that don't lose track of people, that know by name the people who need support that has a triage system in place so that people who need just a slight bit of assistance get that quickly but those who need permanent supportive housing or longer term subsidies that they're identified and moved in that direction. Well, this is a project that we opened last year, this striking new construction called the Conway Residence which is on North Capital in Washington DC and what's interesting here and it's a beautiful building it's 124 units, half of the units are for veterans exiting homelessness in Washington DC and the other half also with a veterans preference for individuals who are lower income working people and then about 17 of the units are set aside within that group for individuals who have a history of mental health issues and receive help from the district mental health agencies and so what's interesting and so future oriented about this building is we've also been working with the District of Columbia as part of 100,000 homes and built for zero. They were one of the first large communities to get to a by name list and so by the time we were planning the last phase of Conway it was a long development cycle but by the time we were getting ready to rent it up we knew that the 60, actually it ended up being about 70 homeless veterans who were moving in were the first 70 on the by name list of the city's homeless veterans who were the most fragile and needed to be moved into housing most urgently and so for us it really has signaled this new kind of convergence of the housing work and the different models that we've been developing over the years and the fact that we're going to solve this problem and actually meet the housing needs of our most vulnerable citizens if we act with that kind of intentionality that we design our housing to fit the people and to fit specific people whose names we know and by housing them we can actually get to a state where all of us have that basic, modest, simple, safe, affordable place to live. Thank you. Give a minute for, thank you so much for that talk and there are so many threads that I wanna follow up on and I know right now even within this room you'll have students from real estate development, from architecture, from planning, from urban design and so much of your talk I think also presents a direct challenge to pedagogy and how we teach so I was wondering if you could take a minute to reflect on to just add a finer point to that just the concept of housing is a verb, right? It's not necessarily a concept that is specific to specific silos, right? It's not necessarily simply a problem of architecture. It's in your sort of reinvention of this subject is truly cross cutting, looking at not only, looking at this problem from the experience of the individual and it's sort of starting with something I saw transformational is simply asking the right questions and trying to understand these issues through people's lives and so I guess my question is looking introspectively, right? Because your entire lecture into some degree is almost like a challenge for a school of architecture to work differently, to not just think about these kinds of issues as siloed relative to architecture or urbanism or public health. Do you have thoughts or reflections on your experience in their real estate program here or thoughts about how we might also kind of change how we're teaching our students or engaging in the world relative to some of these issues that you're facing and that you see across the nation? Ideas about how we might teach and learn differently relative to what you see? Well, the easy part of that question is I remember a couple of really key experiences when I was here at Columbia. One was taking a few classes from Gwen Wright and just thinking about, frankly, the people who use housing and just the whole social construct of why certain housing forms evolved and so that actually was very influential in my, I think, looking at that Times Square hotel and seeing, yeah, you know, I could imagine how design and a different approach to that building could actually create a different environment that was a solution to the housing needs of some and then the other just appreciated, I think at the time I was working at Brooklyn Catholic Charities and these, working on these kind of small, almost impossible projects with, you know, at the end of the day, maybe 20 units would be built and I'm like, everyone else in the program with me had very large ambitions as far as what they'd be building and I'm like, I gotta step it up. Gotta scale it up, right, right. But as far as how teaching should shift and I don't think this is just about, you know, the kind of the social challenge that not very frankly put to you, but I think that we all need to have a different set of tools in our toolkit to just manage the issues that we're facing in this century. We have found that in our own organization and we're playing catch-up, but that there are four critical skills that you kinda need to actually be able to move some of these complex problems forward. One is a basic facility with data and, you know, actually sort of the idea that data is such a powerful tool in any work, you know, I don't need to go further, but it's hugely important that, you know, you understand how to recognize large patterns and use data for problem solving, not judgment. I think that's the big shift, you know, not whether you did well or didn't based on your score or for compliance purposes, but like, are things going in an interesting, good, desired, expected direction or not? And while, you know, I think there's this interesting insight that, you know, we've had, which is, you know, you need some of the access to large data sets to see patterns, but you need very granular data to solve problems. And then the other skill is design thinking, that, you know, it's the idea that you're never stuck, that you just need to form a new hypothesis and test it and iterate. And then coupling that with quality improvement training, I mean, that's really, you know, I think been the revolutionary piece of our work in these movements that, you know, go to our learning collaboratives and everyone's there with their run charts, you know, so different from the way, I think we've been trained to think about how to solve complex problems. And then being able to facilitate meetings of different interest groups, respectfully and effectively and purposefully. So the, you know, like the data, the quality improvement, the design thinking, the facilitation, I think whatever, whether it's climate issues or political division, it's kind of like, how do you move things forward? Convenient. Yeah. I totally agree. So I'm taking copious notes. Because this is, I mean, this is literally how we're trying to, I think, position our students to not just think in terms of, I'm an architect, I am a, but to try to bring this sort of design thinking and kind of creative process to these multi-sector challenges. I had another question and I'd love to open it up to the group here who are probably anxious to get some questions in about, not just the role of the building scale, but the role of literally the urbanism of the sort of contexts in which you work. Particularly struck by, you talk about storytelling, about the stories of how some of the homelessness to put the big, the non-granular level on it, but is also exacerbated by sort of distance or lack of opportunity and many challenges, for example in New York, or as you mentioned, that there's out in the boroughs, or like there's in the rockaways, or it's these kind of places that are far and far from access to transportation, access to schools within a walkable distance, access to parks or open space or other kind of urban amenities that really help to weave people into the fabric of a community and that your phrasing of community solutions is I think so critical. And so I guess I'm very curious as to how you see the role of the city playing out in some of these issues, whether it's the transportation, because I find that the challenge of being if it's a homeless family in New York City is very different from being, someone say in Phoenix, Arizona, we have a two hour commute on a bus or these kind of interrelated nested challenges of school, job, et cetera, kind of become tied up into literally a physical urban landscape that is somehow distance. Have you kind of done any thought on some of those issues relative to transport or other urban forms? Well, some maybe disconnected thoughts on that, but we work now, additional communities have joined built for zero. So we work, I think in three entire states, pretty big ones, New Mexico, Utah, and West Virginia and most of Virginia. And so, they've got some pretty serious geography, but it just goes to this question of you need to go to the people who are, they are trapped in homelessness rather than, the way the system has always worked while we're here and these are our hours and you come with your referral. It's also meant that you need a much bigger team. You need to basically enlist the sheriff, the emergency room nurse, the fire department, people whose daily job is not thinking about homelessness but the community's infrastructure, the public sector workforce. And that the way in which we're seeing this issue get solved, I think has much to offer other complex problems. We've, interestingly, we've gotten just a number of calls maybe because of some of the places we're working about, could we imagine adapting this methodology to the opioid crisis? And the idea is you need, even in dispersed geographies, these can't be understood as, and as much as I'm saying, you need to know each individual, they cannot be understood as the problems of individuals. They are reflecting a broken community system. And so, the model that we really sort of emphasize with the communities in which we're working is a virtual command center. Just imagine it's a hurricane or again, you're setting up the local effort when there's an outbreak of an infectious disease. You need to have, either in reality or virtually, information that's all in the same place, clear accountability and a community level kind of mindset, not like my program only does this. Right over there. Just like we're all in, in this situation. And if that can be constructed, even in kind of very dispersed places like New Mexico, I think they may be the first state to end chronic and veteran homelessness. And again, very poor and very tough. Mississippi is doing it. Go figure. These are places without a lot of resources. It's basically what the federal government sends. But there's almost, I've seen an inverse relationship between a lot of money flowing into a system and the resourcefulness and kind of the essential innovation that emerges. Like, how are we gonna do this? Well, we're gonna have to make the sheriff the outreach worker. Yeah, so. That's really exciting. All right, so I'd like to open it up for some questions from our larger audience. We have some urban design and real estate students here. There's one in the middle. Sorry. If you could say your name and speak. I'm James Russell and I've been doing some work on homelessness with the city. And the city's struggling with, you know, something like 66,000 people a night homeless and saying we can't do what you do with the housing first model. We can only do, we have to do shelters while we try and figure out how we're gonna find those 66,000 units that people need. Of course, two thirds of these are also families which is even more horrific to think about. When we're talking about this kind of scale and we're also seeing these huge increases in a lot of, as you noted, the expense of cities. Are they, is housing first really realistic? Yeah, housing first means, you know, just that but it doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. For instance, you know, I go back to this insight that has been so powerful for us in the communities that are making progress which is homelessness is too big a category. You know, some people really need to be diverted from the front door of the shelter and the attitude of the shelter system has to be how do we do whatever we can to help you solve your housing crisis without processing you into this institution? We see, you know, examples in many parts of the country where that's where they're placing their emphasis. And so they're focused on housing first. How do we get you to not lose your housing? How do we get you back into a situation that maybe is slipping away? But, you know, the issue is on how do we solve your housing problem as opposed to do you or don't you qualify for shelter? I think as long as that mindset governs the New York City system, you know, there's just very little progress to be made. Any follow-up? Okay. We have another question up here. Yeah. Oh, hi. So you were talking about, like, housing, community, our systems. And I was wondering if, like, with people from different backgrounds living together, I was wondering if you had, like, have seen, like, patterns of healthy communities and how would you define a healthy community and, like, health and community? Well, I think, you know, we learned early to think of our big buildings as small towns and, you know, like, who's in charge or the service is good. You know, our people, you know, you know, paying attention to you and kind of knowing you by name. Yeah, that neighborhood. Yeah, like, you know, 12-story neighborhood. But the question of a healthy neighborhood is, it's both subjective or a healthy town, but I'd say in the two neighborhood projects that we are working on to try to get upstream of homelessness, you know, the vision that's shared by all of our partners and the residents we work with is making these neighborhoods safe, healthy, and prosperous. And the measures that we're using really go to what communities, members, say they most value, like how many people are getting into jobs in the case in Brownsville and in the north end of Hartford looking at population health issues. The focus of the next phase of our work there is asthma. I think it's also fascinating, you know, your point earlier in the talk about just healthcare in general, like, when you begin to not only look from the eyes of the individual and listen to stories and kind of, but also taking these models from, you know, other, that have addressed other challenges and kind of overlaying them and looking at where these synergies are is particularly fascinating. I feel like there's also been, you know, there's, I feel like somehow the public health model vis-a-vis architecture is also quite fascinating and opens up all sorts of new territories for us as practitioners, I think, rather than just saying, oh, we're responding to an existing brief or a crisis and rather as a doctor would treat a patient in ER, there's these broader systemic issues to be investigated through research and through combining kind of design, innovation, and action that are just also, I think opens up so many doors in that response. Let's have one more, one or couple more questions here. There's one, oh, sorry, there's one over here. Okay. Hi. So one of the biggest issues right now with affordable housing is the expense to maintain the buildings. So when you're thinking about how to make your projects sustainable long-term, how does your team tackle that? Thus far, and I can answer in a couple of ways, when we've actually built a building, you know, we have typically baked into it a financial model where there's very little or no debt, and so that there's capacity for the ongoing maintenance nets actually by design in cases where the say, in many of the communities that are part of Built for Zero, they're using just existing housing and coupling that available apartment with a rental subsidy voucher of some type, and it's the obligation of the property owner to maintain the housing, and thus far working with chronically homeless and homeless veterans. You know, lots of communities have run out of vouchers, but they're negotiating with landlords to work at lower rates. It's interesting when you see communities who are kind of figuring this out, they've involved the private landlord community. Your, one project we're working on now is maybe an interesting one to be mindful of because we're experimenting with what are some housing models that fit that simple, modest, clean, affordable template, and this is in Denver, and we've got an offer in on an existing building that needs probably about $20,000 per unit and improvements, but we think we can essentially finance it with social impact capital and commercial debt because the residents will have vouchers from the VA, so we do have to model the maintenance costs a little differently, but it does appear in that market that this model works, so you have to be mindful of it kind of, you can get to a different answer depending on the specific conditions. Sorry, a question here, and then there's one behind you too. Hi, my name is Daisy, and I'm teaching housing here at Columbia. I was wondering, it's really, I loved your lecture by the way, and it was really helpful to hear at least housing talked about differently. In one way that it's different is it takes development out of the equation in a traditional sense, right? So, and it leaves the elephant in the room about how you handle housing in relation to how it's funded. So I think my question is really like, how are you managing conversations between developers, the government, how are housing, your particular housing getting funded? How does it all happen? How does it all happen? We look at that, you know, the sort of ecosystem of, so how are these projects funded, right? It sounds like you were getting a little bit into that in the last response. Sure, I can give you, I may be two models, but the thing is, there should be a model in there isn't really, the Conway building that I showed at the end. I think we had like 47 different entities that contributed, you know, I think 15 that actually had very significant sums in the project. And you can look at that as, what great leverage? Or you can also say, this is insanity. You know, it took years to put all that together. And so I think if we want to get serious about having housing systems that work, we have to actually pool our capital and make it a whole lot easier to get money into deals and not at the deal level be figuring out this kind of crazy puzzle. I guess the good news is, yeah, we put it all together, but if we're gonna recognize this as an urgent issue, we've really got to change the model a bit, which is why flipping to the Denver project, our colleague who heads our real estate team is really interested in, you know, given where interest rates are, and there being a lot of social impact capital out there or a lot of investors thinking they'd like to get some sort of safe but socially beneficial return. Like there is more of it, at least I've been told by a number of these investor and family office groups that there is more of it than there are deals that look like they're going to be comprehensible and solid. So we think that there could be some real opportunity there. You know, it's not gonna solve for every situation, but in this particular case, we're buying existing substandard properties, improving them, making them more sustainable and targeting them as we do to the people who are the most vulnerable. We think that this will be an interesting thing to experiment with and possibly transferable. Great to hear. I think there was another question here. Can you pass the mic? Hi, thanks for the lecture. I had, well, two maybe interrelated questions. One, I just moved from Los Angeles, so there's been, I'm sure you know, an enormous amount of money is gonna come into the system through public referenda, but there's also remains an enormous amount of resistance at the local level to actually producing housing from community opposition to the projects themselves. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you reconcile those two forces in your work between maybe having the opportunities at a sort of, say, state level to have the resources to do the project, but not at a local level to find the opportunity to actually realize it. And then the second question would be in the context of the architecture school, where you see opportunities for architecture students or faculty as it were to become involved in the process or maybe to use your term sort of go upstream and rather than waiting for a project or waiting for an RFQ or an RFB that you might be involved in pursuing, but actually to move into the development of these projects or pursue housing alternatives at a kind of structural level as opposed to simply waiting for projects to drop down to the level of a client coming to you or you finding a client? I think, I mean, I don't think there's a single answer to the question you posed about Los Angeles and local resistance and NIMBYism. I mean, I do feel that the future has got to involve just having fewer different housing types and just integrating units within whatever housing or building that are more accessible to individuals with different backgrounds or medical and social challenges. I think it's the standalone projects that are kind of a bit of the flashpoints for NIMBYism. We've never lost a project to NIMBYism, but we have spent years working our way to the buy-in and sometimes it's waiting for a particularly disruptive person to leave the stage, but I do see in a number of the communities that have been part of 100,000 homes and built for zero, once you have a sense of your community being organized and knowing what its aims are and having that data, it's been interesting to see in a couple of places local leaders make the case for this is why we need this new housing because we have this remaining number of veterans. A building strategy alone isn't gonna be sufficient to solve this problem as maybe the note I'd like to end on. It goes to I think the question that Kate raised earlier. This is a problem of broken housing systems is the problem that needs to be at the front, not homelessness. Homelessness is an indicator of that problem. And as long as we're thinking well, this is a project for the homeless and not speaking in terms of the larger system breakdown, I think we end up having the wrong conversation in our development kind of meetings. But as far as students, I mean, I've been excited to learn more just being here this evening about the Hudson Valley Lab and the work that teams here are doing in communities that are struggling that probably have even the infrastructure to do the research on where the funding opportunities are, what the right planning guidelines should be to enable the kind of development that would actually help move them toward having a housing system rather than random activity. So I think this community type work is an incredibly exciting place to focus your pro bono time or your study time. There's a lot of work to be done though and we're beginning to, in Chicago, do some interesting things because they are now, their data is so good on veteran homelessness that we can with them and student volunteers do qualitative interviews of veterans who are coming into their system to know what's happening to them before they come in. And already we found that it's like one VA hospital that needs to be retrained, that lots of these veterans have had contact with the VA and their staff has just said, well, nothing here for you. And so that's a place where students are making a real difference in helping a community understand the dynamics of its housing system. Great, I think we have time for a last question, or two more or one more question? Okay, good. Christoph, sorry. I'm here with the incoming architecture class group. So what we're working on for the first four weeks of the semester is kind of like blurring the boundaries of a quarter of a city turning actually an inside corner into an outside condition. So it kind of like, pedagogically very much looks at something that doesn't recognize or self-identify itself as a kind of a piece of architecture or urbanism or something that sits in between development or the making of that kind of publicity. What we were talking about today in core, and this is why I think like we were all super excited to hear your talk, being also so focused on design and architecture for the particular reason was something along the line of like architecture and politics, meaning like if we like so refreshing, we look at what's available at hand and we are in our case looking at 14th Street, that kind of corridor that's like quite also prominent with a lot of like HDFCs and HPT buildings. How do you deal in even within common grounds and just because it came up today with things like political shifts, like for example, and I love when you point at self-management and looking at maintenance models and so on and so forth. HDFCs to certain degrees were somewhat interesting and successful in that regard. It almost sounds like that common ground kind of like pushes it to the next level of like taking politics out, but at the same time you gotta be able to work with regulations and policies and things of that sort, particularly with, I've been looking at a lot of like HDFC community board meetings these days. They're like so under attack, like also based on like the political shift and like different mayors coming in. How do you deal with it within common ground where you focus on all the right things and all the things that get like, as architects excited, but you are bound to policies as well, right? I'm not sure. I haven't been at common ground for a number of years so I don't know how they're navigating any new politics, but what we always relied on was just a very strong onsite management team and this goes to the NIMBY question too when we'd be entering a new neighborhood. We would talk about our management systems, our staffing, how we would handle problems and that was kind of the packed with both tenants and neighbors and so just that attentive management, we always saw as core to what we were offering residents and the communities our buildings were in and it's interesting. Management is so not sexy but it really is what it all comes down to. Yeah and when you think of all of the failed housing models, I'd say they're designed in management failures and so it's actually, it's been interesting with our Washington DC building. We have a management company that works nationally. I think they have 35,000 units but they're having to learn how to manage that kind of building where the VA has case managers and the goal is no one ever gets evicted here. It's our job to see that every tenant is successful. That's a shift but people can learn. Okay so I guess we'll take some more questions up on the fourth floor at a little reception but I just have the pleasure of thanking you for spending your time here with us at GSAP and I mean your lecture is so inspiring and it is not only kind of a window into how you think in terms of these sort of holistic approach and sort of very personal narrative driven approach to some of these issues. It's really sparked a lot of I think ideas about how we can kind of shift how we think, how we learn and really kind of a chart, a roadmap for how real estate, urban design, architecture, how we can all begin to sort of work together and work differently relative to these incredibly challenging issues of the future. So thank you so much for showing us that thought process. Thank you.