 Hi everyone, I recognize many faces. Welcome, some are, I'm Amal Andros, the Dean for those of you who maybe are joining us from abroad or public. I'm very excited to have a few of our fantastic alumni from across the programs and also our students just wanted to say a few words about the housing lab. The housing lab was founded about a year ago from the IDC foundation. And part of the gift went to endowing the professorship, which is being held by Hilary Sample, a professor of the IDC professor of design and housing. And part of it was a seed fund for the lab. And as a kind of research unit at GSAP, it's quite unique in that there isn't a single faculty assigned to it. It wasn't, it's not like the centers or even the other labs. The idea for it was really about cross program and looking at housing. Not only from acknowledging that housing today and in recent history has been very much separated in terms of design, planning, policy, financing, and it's very rare that all of these aspects of considering housing intersect. And so it was important that the lab do exactly that, that really the lab's work could focus on intersecting, bringing together issues of design, issues of policy, issues of planning, and also thinking about financing all at the same time, which are really the programs that are represented at the school. And so it's been a very interesting experiment in that this first year led by IDC fellow Bernadette Baird-Zarrs and many research assistants from across the programs, as well as students kind of coming in and popping in and faculty advisors as well from across the programs. So the lab really defined its mission, looking at issues of affordability, resiliency, transformation, access, and equity to think about housing for the future. And so after a year of kind of defining itself and being invited to the Venice Architecture Biennale, there's a kind of small exhibition that will be held in Venice when Venice occurs now next, next, or is it next summer, I think, or in two summers. I can't, it's been postponed. There is an opportunity again to, I'm not going to share the work, but the work was really, has been really interesting in looking at issues of code, looking at issues of retrofitting, you know, things that looking at possible partnerships, etc. And the reason why we're holding this, this action session is that what we found is that the lab became a kind of resource for students with office hours and a kind of feedback loop for students work. In addition to having sort of faculty advisors. And so we wanted to continue that spirit of openness and office hours. And so you think about how the housing lab, the housing studio can intersect in new ways and specifically the mission and the focus for the lab next year to really look at the history of housing in terms of segregation in terms of the kind of discrimination that is really, when you think about the United States housing really sits at the center of these practices and Bernadette and Erica Song and Juan Moreno, I think are going to open up ideas about how the lab can kind of become actively engaged in what would be a sort of anti-racist housing practice. So with this, I turn it over to Bernadette. I know that in the spirit of the lab's experimental nature, they've decided to kind of present different parts in different ways. And so this is really a kind of open session. Bernadette, turning it over to you. And thank you everyone for joining us. Bernadette, you are still muted if you'd like to unmute yourself. I'm still new to Zoom. I said it's lovely seeing all of your faces. I just want to say personally how lucky I feel to be a student affiliated with the lab and how extraordinary it's been over the past year to see the conversations and to have Dean Andros with the IDC Foundation in the school make this space to talk, to speak across programs to operate in kind of the area between experimented and between reality. And so it's been a really interesting time. And I think one of the reasons for this hour is we just wanted to simply share our work and share the questions and share the privilege that we feel that comes from being in the lab. So as mentioned, we, I think the work over the last six months in particular is really engaged very deeply with questions as it has to with questions of exclusion and identity and privilege and not enough putting race up front to some extent. And so in the last month we've thought about what can we do and our ways of working in our projects and how we engage within that deceptive make that more as it should be foregrounded and understood and explicit. Although good work should have that embedded and always. And so today, we had three questions that we've been thinking over and would love your feedback on. You know, how can we make our work met more actively anti racist more actively anti white supremacy, engage in question whiteness, and we want to to share where we're at in these discussions with the lab team, and be completely open to your feedback and ideas and participation and really energy as well going forward. So, Juan will lead us through some of the ground rules and process for the next hour. Yeah, so we want to open this base and to guide this conversation with some basic ground rules. First, we want this to be an open space to share and to give feedback and to get your experiences as related to the work of the lab. We know that everyone will likely be coming from different places and that's why we are so we feel it's so important that you are here right now. We recognize that we have, we might be opening some difficult conversations along the way. So we ask that you are gentle with each other. We're going to be talking about for about half an hour and then you guys will take the lead. So we hope you can find a place for your comfortable comfortable to contribute. Three more things. First, this conversation is being recorded. So we know that may that may be daunting for some people to contribute. In a few minutes, you'll be able to participate with some stickies that will be placed on along the slides. If you have any trouble editing or accessing the document, please message. Then in the chat and she'll get you started out. And finally, here on the screen, you can see the emails of the whole labs team. If you want to get in touch with us, please feel free to do so. Just to practice with stickies because we have borrowed this shamelessly from some of the planning students and student groups in the last that have taken place in the last month. There's a link that you can actually access and edit our slides during this session in the chat of your zoom, try to click on this link. For those of you who don't have lion mail and may give issues. Again, GSN is on hand to try to help sort that out and add your name and where your, your affiliation or your graduation year. While you're doing that, I thought we just go around very quickly and have the lab team introduce ourselves so you know, names to faces or that lab fellow. One just spoke. Erica one of the research systems. Joe. Maru since she's unmuted. Hi, I'm Maru. I'm a number of students and a worker at the lab. And I'm Joe sorry I was adding my name and unmute and I'm a PhD student and casual worker. Joanne lab. I'll just call on you. Jenna is here. Urban planning student at the lab. Jin, an urban planner but with a secret architectural background at the lab like many people seem to have have have hidden past. And then is an MS red student and wonderful contributor to the lab and carrying on the work of the research assistant from MS red who is here this spring. And I don't see anyone else at the moment, but I think that's who we are right now. So great. This is the perfect segue into this slide because we can basically introduce everyone at once. And like the Dean sort of summarized very wonderfully at the beginning. The housing lab was started as from the support IDC foundation, and it was just like this really incredible experience to be in one space one physical space initially now of course we're all online, but one space where it is completely interdisciplinary, and it is student facilitated. So it's a place where people from the various programs can come and sort of discuss different projects that they're interested in but also share ideas, information resources, etc. So this year the lab focused on sort of the existing housing stock in New York City, particularly, and you want to. And here you see sort of the people who are involved this summer but there's a growing list of faculty and student alums, as we're calling them, or part of housing lab and I'm sure in the many years to come, this network is just going to really strengthen the way that housing is sort of discussed at GSAP, because people believe and do various things in the industry, etc. And we're hoping that there will always be a tie back to housing lab at So, did you have something to add? So as we looked at the existing housing stock this year, we looked at it from various scales so sort of from the smaller scale architectural interventions that related to code and zoning changes to the financial visibility of these and then sort of zooming out and looking at the area networks of particular neighborhoods that have a more dense concentration of these walk-ups and new alternates. And then even looking at sort of an operational standpoint of how some of these new alternates are run if let's say there's a co-op living in them. And through our research we found that new alternates, so new alternates are basically buildings that were built between 1901 to 1929 mostly. And they sort of represent this moment in New York City's history where there was a big innovation in the way that zoning, basic amounts of light and air and increase the standard of living for people in the city. So we wanted to tie back to this very influential moment in New York City's zoning history. And we found that the New York, the new alternates sort of serves a disproportionate amount of people who are living in overcrowded situations. They're home to a large percentage of the city's black and Hispanic populations. And that's one reason that we found that studying these buildings could potentially have greater impact across the city on kind of an incremental scale, as opposed to sort of proposing, you know, like, raising buildings and building completely new. It's like, how can we tie back to all the stuff that already exists in people's homes. Let's very briefly summarize, you know, one slide per sort of booklet. What you see here are the covers of four booklets that basically piece together and become like this puzzle set of the different ways that we looked at the new alternates. So this first slide is just like a snapshot of how we looked at building interventions to new alternates. There are five different intervention proposals, ranging in focus. So some of the proposals have to do with adding increasing density at an incremental scale. So what you see here is rooftop additional units being added on and the zoning building code that currently inhibits this from happening. So we actually went through all of these codes bylaws and sort of highlighted the things that are not allowing it to happen. And currently this document is out for a period. And the other interventions to this one deals with density, but the other ones might or deal with sort of raising the standard of living. So giving people outdoor space or making the buildings more accessible by adding elevators or changing unit types to convert from typical one to two bedroom units to. Just to add on to what Erica said, I think it's kind of astonishing that many housing centers of housing innovation don't look at existing building stuff, which is where many poor people live and unsubsidized stock. And so we tackled that as a way to engage with kind of the dual crisis of climate change and affordability thinking how can we increase just really basically the resiliency access and inclusion of places that people already live in generally good locations for buildings that house low and middle income people and taking on the walkups of New York City and then taking the slice of the new law tenements in particular and also just to shout out to Erica. This is thousands of pages of code that they've read to identify these these things and as we're pure viewing it this week. My one hesitation is everybody wants to own this and to take it from and to get it to make it go forward and so there's an immense amount of excitement. So just to shout out to that so far. And so we we tied some of these building interventions to financial feasibility studies which. Yeah, so the goal of these financial feasibility studies was to see how we can ensure affordability in this new law tenement stock that meets the AMI levels without actually relying on federal programs or subsidies subsidies like light tech. So using this like six story new Montana building is a case study. We looked at two scenarios scenario one would be looking at the rooftop AB units and scenario two we looked at the conversion of a typical floor of one two bedroom units to an SLR co living arrangement. And so this increased unit density and turn facilitates lower rents for all of the units in the building, which helps maintain a healthy return for both an outside investor and existing building owners. All these ideas that we just heard make a lot of sense at a scale and needing together the buildings for interventions in bundles that perhaps can enable these financial feasibility as well to us unlocking capacity for short amenities has been another one of our topics for research. We are producing area plans for resiliency and that identified priorities within low income communities as well as spaces or amenities that could be supported by networks or buildings along public spaces and with both private and public funding. And finally, we have been looking at the operational structures that's for innovation in housing that doesn't receive a lot of subsidies in the city, which is rare. New York City is specifically in the HDFC model has example examples of experiments in limited equity unlimited income housing, and we have been doing. We have prepared a white paper that's hopefully will be published soon. Where we study and extrapolate from the success and failure of this model from the past 40 or 50 years to look at its organization and the maintenance practices that have helped these buildings to stay afloat. I shouldn't have a loud child. I should say in all of these. They came about through conversations with practitioners and were developed very intentionally through partnerships and through conversations with folks in practice, because the question is how can we use the programs across GSEP to do things to change, not just in addition to changing discourse and how we learn, but to engage with the actually existing built environment and actually existing world of design investment and policy. So, we've been in conversations for those previous parts in particular with Chaya, you have and sidewalk labs. We have a nonprofit that's closely affiliated with the city community based nonprofit and a new developer that has tech funding so across the spectrum and now we're also in conversation with with folks who do zoning and code in New York. To pivot a little bit to right now, we at the lab have been talking about how can we, how can we work better, how can we make sure that the ways that we enjoy working together and that feel productive are formalized we've had a series of conversations about ways that we can make sure to, to keep being and to be to be even a more reflective, more inclusive, more welcoming more safe, more critical space. So these are the, these are the working, working, working things we have now I know that some of the terms are kind of insider terms that we've talked about at the lab, but what we'd really appreciate in the next slide there are stickies. So if you're able to edit the document, put in ideas that things that we're missing what we've left out practices that you've experienced in your own workplaces or own lab settings that we might be able to incorporate or think about. As we go forward, both in the projects and the process that we have and also in our own internal team. Erica, you were going to talk about a few examples of these two. Yeah. So while we were sort of writing down our methodology or ways of working this week. We just wanted to write them in very simple terms and I think the first one kind of ties into that so when we talk about race. We want to be a little bit more direct when we talk about it so we don't want to dance around the issue because housing is so tied to sort of systemic racism in the city and or everywhere and it's really a physical manifestation of these racist structures when we talk about it. We really just want to be upfront to be honest we don't really know how that works and I think that's part of it. It's part of probing each other when someone says something that isn't quite clear to sort of get to the nitty gritty of what we're talking about. And of course, talking about these things also require practice and I think housing lab is supposed to be a place where we can practice talking openly and very clearly about these issues. And point number two comes from a book called Minor Feelings by Kathy Palm Park where she identifies minor feelings as sort of like negative emotions that are built from she calls it the sediments of everyday racial experience and having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. So I think many people can sort of relate to this feeling where in your everyday encounters you experience things that experience racist things or witness racist things that might not seem like a big deal but at the same time sort of build up and the sedimentation of these things are if they're not addressed essentially they become sort of these flash points and we want to address this in housing lab as well within our discussions and the topics that we've approached. We want to make sure that minor feelings are major and we are able to sort of call out these things rather than let it pile up. In our ways of working also just kind of logistically is something that we've already been doing in the lab in the spring but then we want to continue and formalize is making sure just very basic good stuff like ways of working we post our job announcements for casual and early workers circulated to all the students have a transparent selection process. The four of us who started were nominated and interviewed by faculty and program directors but in forthcoming years it'll be applications for the casual workers that's been the case. We have been tried to be very transparent and open with the student community about what we're doing and how to be involved. And then perhaps I don't know at least for me as a former practitioner current practitioner. Most importantly to make sure that the ethos of working is one that respects the folks that we're talking with as co producers who are completely, if not much more, almost certainly much more knowledgeable about their situation in their housing than we are. And so to operate from a point of humility but also understanding exactly what we bring to the table and how we can help and be forthcoming about that. And then inside of our team, you know, making sure that we listen to each other, and this list is from everyone. And it's still very much in progress. And one of the interesting things to me kind of from a disciplinary perspective I'm going to skip over this slide but please add and edit and comment and push back against us if we're missing important things is how we keep circling back to narratives and stories as something that links us together across disciplines. So in early in the spring, as we were thinking about overcrowding and unsubsidized spaces, we started writing little shorts from folks at the lab about their family members about people they knew living in overcrowding overcrowded housing or sharing spaces and how precisely the audio privacy of, you know, individuals was negotiated, how, you know, sync terms were managed. And so something we've been doing along in that spirit and we would love for all you did, all of you to contribute or a question this week is, what has been our experience with race in housing or working on housing as experts and as practitioners in the built environment, in a team whether it be in the language we use in a project whether it be the expectations that people have of going into a certain place, and so forth. So we have started writing those are sharing them. And at the end of this presentation we have stickies we probably won't have time during this hour but we really invite folks to add to them and to stay afterwards they'd like to or to reach out to us on the email addresses. Later, because we found that these narratives fit with our mission at the housing lab of engaging with the nuance and heterogeneity of experiences of people in their homes and in their neighborhoods that's often overlooked, we think by design and by policy and by development the shapes of houses don't match. The neighborhoods don't always match the ways that building and finance and planning happens doesn't reflect the broad range of lived experience. And so this comes back and enriches I think our own work and methodology. Yes. So on the things that we're going to do and expansions and this is very preliminary, but we wanted to share with you because we're excited about it. And we see it as continuing and expanding our work. Yeah, so we're in the initial exploration stage of what mixed income communities look like. And because when Hatville is so close to us, so Columbia community, we want to focus on that neighborhood, not really as an institution and not really a community figure but really work with the community and figure out what housing needs and what small changes or proposals can can work really to to have a closer title in the neighborhood. Yeah, I just want to jump into to add a very specific thing. As you all probably read in on learning whiteness the letter published by Jesus black faculty. Columbia needs to really address the damage it has inflicted upon Harlem and start to repair it. And I believe there's, there's a question that we got in the chat that aims at these sort of processes. So for us working with Manhattan bill is just the first step in the lab's vision to conduct these principles that we have stated previously for anti racist work. Yeah, so really focusing on the neighborhood beyond Columbia's presence in the neighborhood but really focusing on what housing means for the community and the people that live there. What the overlooked stories are, and we have an example of the East Harlem neighborhood plan that's shown in the slide that can help us a precedent into looking into making sure that Manhattan bill stays a mixed income neighborhood and doesn't slowly trickle into gentrification more than it is already. And I should say I think that onto that, you know, our approaches, we don't want to be students who are just using the time and resources of community organizations in Manhattanville. So we're starting out by saying, here's what we've been working on existing housing, we have some really exciting and detailed and, you know, dozens of pages long examinations of what could unlock more development on existing neighborhoods and make them, you know, strategies to continue and expand affordability there, but to talk with folks who are there and say, you know, we can draw. We can make maps, we can write. What are you working on is there's some small way that we can contribute. We are not going to be able to change Columbia's relationship to Manhattan bill. We have a whole group of students, but we wanted to see if there's something very modest and very humble that we could start a conversation and with with the understanding that there's decades of mistrust there. And so to do so humbly and I just want to thank Dean Andreas for providing some really great introductions and support for this work. And he's put us in touch with Maxine Griffith who's then put us in touch with folks who are working in the neighborhood and I think, I think it could be tricky but I think we're going about it in the right way, slowly, and being very transparent about what we can do. And we'll see if it works and maybe it won't. So another, another conversation that's come out of the lab in this month has been thinking as as Dean and Dros and we mentioned in the beginning of the call kind of the way that the lab has served as a space for all of us to learn and have critical discussions around housing, and how can we share that with more folks at GSAP, and in particular student peers. So, in the second year or the third semester of the MRC studio sequence is housing studio. And this is a decades long sort of tradition at Columbia and, you know, just like the amount of work and the type of exploration that comes out of the housing studio is incredible. And like Bernadette just mentioned, we thought this would be an incredible opportunity to sort of expand the resources of housing lab to not just within housing lab itself and its immediate circle, but also to the housing studio so how can this sort of be an overlay on top of the design exploration that's happening. And so right, we met with the faculty last week and we're sort of developing ways that we can provide resources for the core three students, the housing studio students but also resources that can then be expanded to the rest of the school to the community, etc. So what you see down below the four black boxes are sort of the main objectives that we want to plan for the first two being a little bit more sort of products. So the first one is a list, or a series of lists that are sort of broken down into bits of housing and categories so housing and intersectionality housing and the legacy of white supremacy housing in light of coven 19 which is, you know, we're all going through it and experiencing it personally right now. So the reading lists would incorporate not just books but also recent articles, thought pieces, etc. So the question is, do we really need another reading list. There's so many reading lists out there right now. Is there a way that we could contribute to what is already out there by giving an additional filter through the lens of Jesus. Are there faculty alums, etc. We'll have done work relevant to these topics that we sort of highlight in the beginnings to sort of reinforce that work that's already been done and then we can then tie into the stuff that's out there. So the reading list is one aspect that we're thinking of and it would be available online as a series of hyperlinks, and then also terminology so terminology personally is something that was a great surprise for me when I first started at housing lab something that it didn't expect to make such a big impact, but I think even just learning terms from the other disciplines like I had no idea what am I was I'm sad to say before I started at housing lab. And now that I know and I fully understand or somewhat understand. So we can engage in conversations with people and housing and real estate, etc. Whereas previously it would have been sort of this barrier. So having, again, maybe it's a hyperlinked glossary that not only defines what the term is but then relates it to resources that people can choose to explore further, if they wish. And then also we were hoping to have a series of weekly conversations that wouldn't just be for the housing studio students but could be open to school for alumni etc. Bernadette maybe talk a little bit more about that. Sure. Yeah, first we had an idea to do one. Then we thought we'd do them monthly and then all of the team and the students we've spoken with have said that they need to happen weekly we're stopping here we can't do more. We're a small team, but what our thought was that everybody wants to learn these days some people learn through reading and this other people like myself learned through listening often. Or when most people can do both. And we have a lot of amazing expertise and folks who know things that G SAP and our broader alumni community and professors. And so to have an hour every week dedicated to a short with different open to different formats co facilitated by a student at the lab and a guest. So that can be you, one of you, many of you all of you around topics that we and you on the next slide can propose. And so that's really where we're going to spend the bulk of the remaining time is to think about how best to we can use our time in preparing and carefully facilitating these sessions to be useful to to you all and to be interesting. For example, something that came to mind for me, I have a, there's a student in the planning PhD program who knows a ton about redlining and Professor Mario, good and also knows a lot about redlining. I would love to hear from them, a compressed history of 10 minutes of redlining and then be able to have a conversation which people can ask ignorant questions good questions hard questions. Put them in conversation with each other, not in a way, they, they are both experts and they could both give formal presentations, but in a, in a format that is more like a conversation. So those are, that's where we're at now but we're also open to other ideas how this format could take place. And we're aware that everything we do and the structures of how we do things often just reproduces bad ways of working and of being an exclusion so please. Let's be inventive together. Then, one thing that we didn't mention also just to, before we go on to the next is that in conjunction with the resources and kind of an open list of gsaps thinking has been where good starting designs have, have lived is that will host open open office hours for this fall just the core three students but maybe going forward in the spring as well to be a place where folks can come with specific questions about the projects and ideas on on where they might turn to next or perhaps most importantly, this is something that's happened in the lab anyway, accidentally, is, oh, you're working on x. Did you know so and so and ms read it's also looking at x. And now there are two students looking at very similar things across different programs and so connecting them. And I think being able to harness that power across you stuff will be some interesting stuff. So, if it's all right with you all. We wanted to jump ahead and just have a mad collective sticky editing session, I admit I'm a planner. This is the best we can do ugly stickies on zoom. We would like ideas for topics, we would love for you to, you don't need to put your name or uni next to them if you'd like to be anonymous also keep in mind we have a link to document to this if you'd like to open it up and give us critique on this session as a whole how it's run we'd love that. You know it's being recorded so this would be a space where you could put feedback for us how to do this better next time. But on the stickies topics that we should cover ways of structuring the conversation and even better if you'd like to sign up to co facilitate or co lead a session with a housing lab student or just, you know, take it away with someone else and we can turn over our space and Mike and wonderful students to you for the week. If you also have questions about housing lab specifically, because I know people have various reasons for why they wanted to join the session today. Please feel free to speak up. We would love to hear what your interests are as well, and how we could collaborate. We know that some people write best in silence but we thought we'd try to do writing and introductions at the same time because we're compressed for time so if you can feel comfortable unmute yourself say why you're here and some of the thoughts or questions you have that'd be great and also edit the stickies while you're at it. And I admit I'm being hypocritical I can't edit the stickies without stopping my screen share so I hope that it's happening. But I'm Bernadette, and I'm a six year almost done urban planning PhD student. And I'm here because and I love working with the lab and it's also, I've realized how I have lived in rural areas that have been really segregated and I've often I grew up mainly in the black side of town in West Virginia and in other places when I was little, and how I didn't really understand what made it that way. Bernadette, I wonder if you could actually, instead of doing the presentation view you could actually just show the screen. And then we could go through some of the suggestions that have already been posted on the stickies. Oh, because it won't. Yeah, it doesn't live update yeah. So if I have the slide open I could, we could switch, switch to my share so that Bernadette doesn't have to find the. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't realize it was okay. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'll stop and we'll see. I'm going to channel my professor self and start cold calling people to introduce themselves unless someone unmutes. Sorry, I do have one thing that I wanted to say. If there are any students on the call right now who are entering core three and would like to be involved in sort of curating the, the resource list that we'd like to put together for the core three students like please reach out to me. I'd love to work with you and also get your thoughts on what you're expecting from housing studio. It's kind of like this big moment and I guess a G sub students G sub and mark students time. So I think it would be really interesting to discuss it before your sister semester. Well, I'd like to add a couple of things. I am. My name is Victor body loss and by the way, I'm an architect and I do a lot of affordable housing projects. I am working with. All law and new law tenement projects renovations of those and also new construction affordable housing projects and I realized in working with that that it's two different realms. In other words, the people who handle new construction at HPD housing preservation and development for the city. And the people who do renovation of all law tenement projects and new law tenement projects have two different mindsets in terms of their approach to the product that is is given back to the community. I think what would be good is for the housing lab after you've done all of your studies and come up with your suggestions is to meet with say HPD with the renovation group and sort of talk to them about what your findings are. I'll give you an example quickly in that when we approach renovation projects or rehab projects, the attitude is to pack it in as much as possible with very little amenities and just give the same number of units that the buildings had initially to the new renovation. In other words, I've got a project that we're working on. It's about 70 apartments. There were 70 apartments in the building originally and they asked us to redesign the project and put in 70 units. That doesn't make sense. Right. In other words, you've got bigger bathrooms, bigger kitchens. You want to put in amenities. You know, the old law buildings were designed poorly. So when you try to convince them that it just doesn't work, you come against some kind of resistance. So I think it's important that you affect policy, you know, to try to do this work in a vacuum. And I'm sure you're not doing it in a vacuum, but to do it without affecting policy and the mindset of the people who've got bean counters asking that we have to have 200 units of housing, regardless of the quality of the housing is an issue. I think the new ground up construction branch of HPD, EDC, and all of these other agencies have a totally different mindset. And I think if we could get the housing lab to affect policy in terms of all of the things that you've talked about, I think it would be a great thing. You need to engage them more in the work that you're doing. Of us engage them. How talk to us that sign that would, I think that that's such an excellent. How can you engage them? Was that a question? I said, that's that's exactly our mission. Can you help us? Of course. Absolutely. We just need to call them. We need to meet with them. We need to show them. It would be great to get is, you know, say, for example, a project goes out, you get that, you know, if HPD is working on a project, get the housing lab to review the projects based on some of the issues that you've talked about. So you can say, okay, we need more. We need a daycare. We need, we need boundaries. We need more light and air. We need an ability for people to have ownership of the buildings. We need to figure out how, as the systems age, you know, how they will be replaced or how they're going to be maintained by the tenants if they own the buildings or we need for HPD or whatever agency should have some kind of a plan for maintaining systems because that's the biggest problem. When you have boilers that shut down in the middle of winter and there are no resources to replace those boilers at that time, or it now starts to take away resources from other projects, then that becomes an issue. So I think, again, from the racial standpoint, ownership is very important and income, income that's commensurate to the growth of the buildings, the growth and aging of the buildings, and it is very important to racial equity or social equity or demographic equity. I think without that, it's going to come back here in 25 years and, you know, we're doing the same thing. I see Professor Sutton has her hand up as well. First of all, I want to congratulate you on your, just the whole way the team is working together, your collaborative process, the democratic principles, the idea of listening and being kind to one another. I think that you have established a wonderful way of working and also the idea that you're going to focus on a specific neighborhood that's nearby and in particular looking at gentrification. I want to put something on the table, which is I think you have to consider a little bit what your assumptions are, your beginning assumptions are about what is housing. Housing is a main way that the dominant society reinforces itself, reinforces its values. And we've had two major, major threats to those values. One is the virus in which this idea that housing is for living and you go someplace else for working and to go to school and all of that is now, you know, it's in question. And then George Floyd's lynching brings into question the whole idea of how housing has been used to oppress black and brown people. So part of your work and, you know, some part of it I think should be maybe working on two tracks, one that accepts housing as it is, housing, you know, as we know it. And you go to these agencies and you try to work with Manhattanville and do some very practical things. But I think another part of it has to get out of the box and say what is housing in the future that would be more democratic, that would not be strapped into the white patriarchal society. The form of housing has been a tool of oppression and to question that. Because in between the questioning of what is housing and then working very specifically on housing as it is given in today's society, I think you'll create another space for that issue. Thank you. We started this spring from kind of a point of being angry that housing is beyond the unit and the way that it's conceptualized just as, as you said is wrong. And now we said there are these two moments that open the conversation more broadly at a society that we need to move quickly and boldly in. So can we ask you for help to going forward? And besides revolving? Absolutely. I mean my answer to your question is what has been your experience with race and housing? I wouldn't be an architect if I hadn't grown up in discrimination. I got to be an architect finding a way to get around racism. That's how I got to be an architect. So yes, I'm on your team. My name is Leslie King. I have a comment. I actually included it in the chat because I can't access the document, but it is similar to that idea that you just said about thinking about housing as it is today and how it should exist potentially in the future or some being a bit more dreamy about it and this is slightly practical, slightly dreamy. I have a unique position of being from the Northeast. I'm from New Jersey. So I've grown up, you know, in New York, I've family live in New York, but professionally I've worked around the country. And so like the typology of housing is very different around the country than necessarily in New York. And I know obviously GCEP has a New York focus, but just thinking broadly for a second. One of there's two things I struggle with when we talk about affordable housing and I work in affordable housing I have worked in affordable housing is the idea of affordable housing being an in condition versus an option on a spectrum of housing options. I think it's something that's definitely necessary. And, but again, an option and not just an end all be all. And to that point, I think one of the things that troubles me when we talk about affordable housing is a need for it exists because of wealth and equity in America. And that for me is literally tied to race I'm a black American and so there's there's a lot of different layers to that conversation for me. So, for me, rentership, the word like white patriarchy and like the whites is I'm a real estate developer so like the world of whiteness and real estate development is inherently one of ownership that people live in places that are owned by someone else. And that I one of the things that I challenge as a developer myself as this idea of ownership. Yes, it's a little bit different for me to be a black woman property owner, which makes it a little bit more palatable by the end of the day, I'm the owner of where someone else's home is. And so what does it look like to think about the transition of that is like a normal notion for you to not necessarily own the place or haven't even any type of ownership stake in the place that you're living, affordable or otherwise. The lab was really privileged to host Mark Norman earlier this spring and I don't know if his lecture was available online but he engaged really directly with race and ownership and ideas of cops are limited equity as being both useful and also also perhaps very problematic in terms of limiting the amount of assets and household wealth that's been so unequal in this. Just to add to what Cecilia just mentioned. If you look at it, most people, particularly black people were housed in wherever they live, particularly those that rent. If one could think of housing and ownership, and you use housing for to socially and economically raise the quality of lives of people so that they can at some point be able to even sell their units after they live there for a long time. You've just transformed them from one demographic economic demographic level to another that's empowering. So I think it's very important to look at ownership and look at housing affordable housing and ownership as equal levels because once that's done. You can essentially improve the lives of people who would otherwise be disenfranchised or who would live from point A to point B in time and at the end of the day they're still in the same position. Just a quick housekeeping that we it is 1159. Some of us, many of us in the lab team are happy and would love to stay on. But if you do need to go, you want to be respectful of your time to and thank you to those who are able to come today and if you haven't given us your email addresses zoom is weird we can't circulate a paper sign up sheet to harass you later with but please write us in the chat or put it there so we can if you'd be interested in being out to from the lab and being included in our events and just and just put a sign up in the chat box as well to have let us have your contact information with that. I don't want to interrupt. Let's let the conversation continue among those who can stay as possible. Yes hi this is Mark box I'm an alumnus of the urban planning program at Columbia I have to jump off now but there's a pleasure to be part of the session today and so I left some comments in the chat room hopefully you'll get to look at them and hopefully they'll add to some of the research you're doing in housing, but it's been a pleasure. So, thank you all for posting this session today. Hopefully, I'll be able to be part of future sessions. Thank you Mark for all of your comments will definitely add these to the stickies as as we go. Thank you. Any current students one other question that we've been struggling with the lab is how to engage your ideas going forward. And the only ideas that we've had in this time of zoom are emailing with a call to respond. We don't like surveys. But what are things that we can do to gather your opinions and feedback that aren't email, especially for current students. Or if any folks want to continue on the bigger conversation that'd be really great to I just, my mind is always full of logistics. Maybe like a another resume session with current students could be helpful just to discuss it because I always feel like having dialogue is much more productive than like inputting what I think and then like hoping somewhere it like goes to the people that like change it. And I know that like a lot of current students would be open to joining it needs to be Professor Sutton's comment in the chat box. One of the questions we've been struggling with at the lab is how bold to be and how big to be and how pragmatic and grounded to be. I think if there's one thing we're hearing today is we should be bolder. I have a question. Are you looking is the housing lab looking at current projects that are going on around the city right now or are you looking at other models of housing projects that are in the pipeline. Is that I guess that's waiting for someone else from the team. Yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to. Well, I'm trying to remember if I don't think we've actually looked at ongoing projects, although at one point we did discuss like it would be incredible to compile a list of all the affordable housing projects going on in the city and really analyze them. In an architectural sense to see like how many of these like how separated are these units you know you have like the horrific corridor scenario where there's just like a completely separate entrance. How have they been designed. I know that there was a document from DCP. I think Justin Garrett Moore was part of creating that document recently about affordable housing in New York City so there is stuff that we could mind from. We talked about it but we haven't actually started I'm not sure why Bernadette, do you remember why the one of that direction. Our mandate from the dean and starting out is try to look at spaces where we can intervene and make a change in all we can also take advantage of the freedom that we have not being not having a client not having a project that's going on right now to to be a voice that's not that is design has a design approach and is interdisciplinary and so I think we certainly should learn from ongoing projects. And so if there are ones that you think we should connect to or can know about that be wonderful and part of it's just our own ignorance and you know when we're sitting in the lab or sitting here sometimes. We have many of us have worked a lot before and so we call up our former professional connections and ask them you know how much our elevators costing now. But to be able to engage in the problematize those I think we'd need ideas how and so that'd be great if you have ideas. Yeah, I think I think that would be great idea there's a lot going on. You know, in affordable housing in terms of, you know, getting amenities empowering people by doing a lot of mixed use projects, you know, in, you know, the places like churches that are atrophied are now doing mixed use projects where the tenants or the owners of the apartments members of the church, you know, I mean there's a lot that's going on in affordable housing now that one could actually you could actually have a large effect on by just knowing where they're going and, you know, sort of helping to marshal the direction in, you know, positive direction. But yeah, I would love to be a part of and to help in any way that I can. Victor, it would be great to talk to you about the projects you're doing with the old and new law tenants. Sure. Yeah, get your contact in front send you the document. We're working on a project now that we're very excited about it's really used to be a detention center that was demolished. And now we're putting up 740 units in five buildings and it's going to have a base, you know, that the base of the building will have grocery stores, banks, you know, job training centers, you know, dance studios, you know, bakeries, you know, things that empower the community or also have a large park or large piazza that the entire development is is focuses on. So the whole idea again is to bring the level of this is new construction because bring the level and the standards of living up as much as possible for the residents. So yeah, and then lots of other projects in the city that are doing similar things. There's this whole issue with this COVID thing, you know, I mean, how does that affect racism? How does that affect the tenants who live there? So that's another thing about public health and how that is going to be a major factor in affordable housing moving forward, particularly people who don't have the ability to move out of the city because they don't have the resources to do so at this time, or at any time. Or the ability to even leave their home. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. So with this project, we're adding a, you know, medical facility so that that would be something that would help as a daycare center. So the programming and again, the political will is very, very important. The pro, you know, I think the city is also put a big, you know, is back this project. And so this political will to do that is there, you know, without the political will, you know, essentially, you still find this racist policy policies that go on in different cities. We talk about places like Seattle where, you know, the average income is what about 150,000 or something like that. So that impacts on affordable housing. And because it's impacting on the affordable housing in that area, you get a lot of homelessness if affordable housing is not being built because, you know, developers want to build market rate projects. So how do you as a housing lab affect those sort of cities? How do you as a housing lab start to bring in social equity that will enable, you know, people who are not dot comers or people who are not, you know, don't work for Facebook or Amazon. How do you allow them to be members of that community without having to push them far to the suburbs and force them to commute to the city does continuing that cycle of, you know, poverty. So I think I think affordable housing really links to look at the economies of state scale when it comes to income. You know, without you just looking at it just from the design standpoint, I think is is is is a fault. I have to leave guys. Thank you very much. This is incredible. I will leave my contact information in the chat, but please keep me posted. We will reach out. Yeah. Thank you. All right. I also have to leave, but thank you everybody who joined and I hope we can continue to have these conversations in the future. Not recorded maybe. Yeah, have a great week everyone. Thank you. I'm speaking for myself, but perhaps for the whole team of the lab. We didn't expect to get these many people today, but we're very grateful for your time and your contributions both in the chat in the stickies in the conversation here. I think even more excited to continue working on what we're doing, taking into account the very profound questions that were posed today. Yeah, to echo Juan said to I think it's brought up for us the big questions that we had in them in the beginning, which was six months ago, nine months ago, not very long ago about should we try to engage in housing and housing for people who have been excluded and don't have money needs money. And should we engage with the big structural issues of unfairness that are there. Should we look at, you know what we can do at the margins, should we look at the unsubsidized space so I really these questions bring us back and are exactly what we needed to be doing right now. Thank you so much for coming out to all of you, if you're willing, and follow up and really look forward to seeing you at the weekly conversations. I hope and think that they'll be open to alums. Leah Cohen will know more about that, and will continue to try to be as transparent and and take advantage of the energy that you all have to to power own work and make it deeper, harder, more uncomfortable and better.