 This is Don Rowan in Oropaul at Norwich University and we're doing the economic diversity and the build environment and it's a panel discussion with a number of experts that are going to be discussing this for the next hour and so we're looking to hopefully you'll join us and enjoy the show. We're joining us for our last event of the 2018-2019 Norwich School of Architecture and Art lecture series, a symposium on economic diversity and the built environment. I'm Talia Stanneroff, I'm an assistant professor of architecture here and co-chair of the lecture committee with this semester with Matt Lutz and Eleanor de Ponte there and Matt Lutz will also be helping to moderate. So this symposium I want to note is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Resiliency and Security and also the Design Build Collaborative and we also want to give a special thanks to the Dean of Students Office for offering the generous reception that you'll have after the symposium. So we're lucky to have this incredible group of international scholars here to discuss how current housing conditions can be adapted to meet the needs of the underserved populations. They have an expertise that ranges from areas including a focus on homelessness, migrant housing, low income housing, zero energy housing, building codes and mixed use housing. This symposium then is this unique opportunity to bring these robust voices together to further understand how to make high performance housing in every sense of the word available to houses of all income levels. So to introduce our panelists, we're joined remotely by. By Ms. Sara Lopez. Sara is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a built environment historian and migration scholar. She's also the author of this book, The Remittance Landscape, The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA. This is in our library, so you can go check it out. In 2017, she received the Spirokostov Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She's currently researching two projects, the Architectural History of Migration Detention Facilities in Texas and the relationship between 30 years of continuous migration between Mexico and the U.S., and the development of informal, binational construction industry on both sides of the border. Next, we have David Shear. David is an architect and a builder and an energy modeling expert who recently built his own zero energy home in San Francisco, although he's built many more as well. He started a nonprofit called Minimum Viable Life to support his homeless neighbors in the local communities and hopes to support other communities with these minimum necessities of living, like food, shelter, laundry, showers, and simple neighborliness. So currently, David is also a CTO of Plan It Impact. He's worked on special projects managers, as a special projects manager with Autodesk in Building Performance Analysis Group, and in land planning and GIS research. So he has worked as a contractor, a fisherman, and perhaps the coolest, a float plane pilot in both California and Alaska. And on David's left is Gina Mariff. Gina is the principal of Northern Real Estate Urban Venture and has over 23 years of real estate development and investment experience, underwriting over 3.5 billion in real estate transactions and managing over 6,000 units of housing in various stages of development. Her recent industry recognitions include Built by Women, two site award winner for National Capital Commons and Manny Hallen at 4,800, Developer of the Year, 2017 by DC NOMA, and 2018 Washington Business Journal Minority Business Leader Award Honoree. Gina's left is Barbara Brown-Millson. Barbara is an assistant professor of urban and environmental planning from the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, where she's also the director of inclusion and equity. She authored Resilience for All, striving for equity through community-driven design, as well as questioning architectural judgment, the problem of codes in the United States. Her research focuses on the history, theory, ethics, and practice of sustainable community development and on the role of urban social movements in the built world. And finally, we have Alex Chopron. Alex is a lecturer, he's a PhD, he's a lecturer in urban geography at the University of Leeds in England, so he's joining us internationally. And his award-winning writing about planning and segregation and regions has appeared in numerous professional and scholarly journals. He's the author of the recent book, The Road to Resegregation. Yes, to resegregation north in California and the failure of politics, which is also in our library, check it out. Born and raised in California, he spent a decade as an immigrant rights and housing activist in California and New York before becoming an academic. So here's how this symposium is going to go. We're going to have short presentations from each of these incredible scholars and practitioners, and then we're going to open this up to them as a moderated discussion that we really encourage all of you to participate in. So raise your hands, we'll find a mic, and we'll come around and grab your questions. This is really supposed to be very interactive and lively to see. So we will begin with Sara Lopez. Much for allowing me to participate as a disembodied floating head. Also, I want to say in advance that I have prepared, because I have many slides I'm going to be going through quickly. A little, can you see that? I can see it. Okay. And I'm an architectural historian, but I'm an architectural historian of ordinary built environments, and my work is at the intersection of U.S.-Mexico migration in the built environment, and I have several projects that try to understand the material history of migration on the book, because the book is initiated. It's a book that is multi-sided. So a lot of the research is both in Mexico and in the United States, which is why I have this subtitle of Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and in Urban USA. Is this working, Kalyak? It's working great. Great. So remembering to the transfer of funds from one location to another. As you see in this Guardian mapping, remittances are obviously a global phenomena. The flow of remittances between the United States and Mexico is one of the largest after China, India, and the Philippines. But remittance also as a noun is to postpone to defer. And because I'm an architectural historian who does oral history and ethnography as well as understanding the built world, it's very important to understand what that difference is about. Why is it that people are deciding to send money from the United States to their hometowns in Mexico to realize houses and public projects for what kind of future? My research takes place in Palesco. And I've also been to other Mexican states to study the phenomena, but mostly in the south of Palesco and in Los Altos, and mostly in small Pueblos and towns of 2,000 persons or less of this flow of dollars that are coming from migrants who are working across U.S. cities. And I also want to underscore one thing about this flow. This is really a small portion of migrants' income. Most of the money migrants earn in the United States is being spent in the United States. It's being spent on housing here, on rent, on food, on daily living, commerce. This is about saving and sending over long periods of time in order to realize a certain achievement that might not have been attainable without migration and that might not be attainable for these persons in the United States. One of the main things being produced are houses. So I write a lot in the book about remittance houses, and I've written and studied that also a little bit outside of Mexico and El Salvador as well. And you can see here that formally they're fascinating in terms of some of the architectural features that are being introduced. The bottom slide, the bottom photograph, is showing you three houses that are actually attached to each other with a long continuous facade. And it's the remittance house here that has kind of pushed back, has punched out that wall to have it set back to create a cardboard and to distinguish itself from this kind of vernacular type of construction found in that location. But what I'm really interested in beyond the formal characteristics of the houses is the social histories and social stories that are embedded in these construction projects. So you're looking here at Son and his brother who are working in a meat market in Oakland, California. His wife who's living in their house in Guanajuato with daughters has this arrangement where the son and the father send the money to support the livelihood of the other half of the family that is fragmented geographically. So we have to think of course about the costs that that occurs for that particular family, the patient. Many homes are waiting for years, if not decades, for incremental flows to be able to complete them. Sometimes homes are abandoned. And it really is through oral history and trying to understand what happens to individuals and families that allows us to understand what's happening in these changes in the landscape in Mexico and why there are all these kinds of stages of occupation. Finally, with the Rembrandt's house, we see an emerging distinction between people in these rural localities, between people who have migrated and people who have not. So we have to think about what does it mean to have access to dollars? What does it mean to live and to dwell within a context of migration? And what does that mean for the families who are not a continuous migration or that economic flow? Also to scale up, and I will try to, let's see if I can, I also look at larger scale public projects. So not just housing, but I still think that this speaks to the theme of economic diversity in the built environment and where and how that's happening and for whom. So this is what, what you're looking at here is a rodeo arena. This was built by a collective group of migrants who live in both Los Angeles and Nevada and they're organized. And this is a multi-year project obviously and one that involved lots of micro fundraising in the United States, five, 10, $20 at a time to eventually accrue the tens of thousands of dollars it took to build this state of the art arena for bull riding. And the questions that the research I do asks, for example, are questions about how does this material change in the built environment also change cultural and social and economic moors and habits? So for example, bull riding is a big part of life in this rural locality in Southern Jalisco and the Hinetis where the bull riders have become professionalized. So it's one of the changes that has come with it being more of a large-scale event. We also see in these rodeo marinas a lot of national advertisements coming into really small places like Seoul here, beer, the government has also supported the funding that the migrants are sending for the realization of these projects and that's what you see on the left that that sign is explaining. And then of course just a sort of micro economy of people during these events selling all kinds of goods and having it be a way that they can bring a small-scale development to towns that for the most part in this place are still largely agricultural-based. Finally, thinking about what new spatial hierarchies are created in Mexico because of this economic flow. So what you're seeing here is two of the presidents of the micro hometown associations handing checks over to the municipal president of the locality in Jalisco checks for the realization of future changes with the arena and also parking lot next door. And next to them are the men who are living in that town on a daily basis and who are the managers of that space. And the question becomes if they don't participate in the actual financing do they get to participate in the decision-making process about how that space functions and for whom and what changes are made. I also wanted to just give you a quick sense just two minutes on some of the mirror changes in the United States that are related to these changes in Mexico. As I was just discussing the importance of bull riding and the arena I have a project that looks also at the emergence of the arena and the rodeo arena in Joliet which is on the outskirts of Chicago also related to a continuous migration between Mexico and the US. If you zoom in to that slide you can see that circle right by Rosalind Street which is the arena that was built in the 1970s one of the oldest that I could date in this outskirt of Chicago specifically for a Mexican equestrian event. And there are horse staples there that are very informal that are catering to Mexican clientele. There are those who can't return due to migration. We brought the ranch to bring a band of Mexico here for our covenitos who migrate and for who many years passed without seeing a pony or a bro or a horse. So it's interesting to know that there are kind of a whole parallel series of bull riding and also horse equestrian events that are happening in Chicago that are outside of the Professional Bull Riders Association for example. And if you zoom around Joliette which is the place where this tradition has really taken root because it's been happening there for decades you can start to find these circles in these aerial views that will over the area. So zooming in here to this image as well you see some of the adjacencies that this might create and some of the questions it might raise. When you have a chariada happening right against this condo unit and here you're looking from within the bull riding arena or that not too high fence to the windows of the condo. These are really critical spaces. They're spaces for migrant solidarity. They're spaces where migrants from all over Mexico and beyond to Spanish and where various traditions are fomented and continue. So as I've given you and this is my final slide to questions that dovetail more broadly with this theme of economic diversity and also hopefully specifically with housing. The first one being how we study the built environments critical to understanding who landscapes are for and how they function. So for me as a historian my answer to that is that ethnography and oral history is critical right now. We have to be talking to people to understand places. The second is that migrants capacity to contribute to the construction of a new built environments on both sides of the boundary is linked to immigration policy and the social, political and economic context of migration. For many, many people that I interviewed and I spoke with who came here in the 1970s and 80s and came through all different mechanisms and means formally with papers. And this is not about, you know people necessarily being documented or being documented. There's a million stories and a million different ways in which people have come here and then chosen to live here for multiple years. And a lot of the people that I spoke with who came in the 1970s and 80s told me that, you know the US was the land of opportunity and they no longer felt that it was for their children. And so thinking about what was possible for a group of migrants who have been here in the United States for 20, 30 years and is that same realization or possibility something that can happen today? And finally, when we think about equity in the built environment we have to enlarge our geographic frame of reference are there so-called working class or so-called migrants able to create viable lives for themselves near their places of work? Is that a choice? Why is it that these houses in Mexico are being built? Is it purely out of a desire to have ties with one's hometown? Is it also a reaction sometimes to a lack of choices in the host city? And that's it. So thank you very much. Thank you. This presentation is gonna be looking at I like to call it shelter because not everybody needs or wants and certainly gets housing but everybody needs shelters. So I've been thinking about this a lot the last couple of years and so my presentation is really a review of what I've learned and what I've experienced about this in the last couple of years. So a good way to frame the discussion about housing and about sheltering people is often around density. So this is a residential housing density map which I wanna show at first just to kinda show, get some ideas about the numbers, okay? So a lot of it is a very low density neighborhood. I actually live in the outer sunset here which is about 15 to 20 units per acre, a unit that houses an average of about two people. And these higher density, high rise areas are gonna be 50 plus units per acre. So just to frame all these slides, I'm always putting the metrics of units per acre, the cost for building the unit and the cost for the land which are some good metrics for judging how viable these are, how much the cost, how well they can solve this problem. So there's been a lot of great creative solutions in the last few years proposed. This is one of them, a tiny house, you guys are actually building one here. These are actually about 100 square feet. And this is a project that's proposed for Berkeley where they're doing 25 units on about a half acre lot. So we've got about a 50 units per acre. And you remember from the last slide, 50 units per acre is kind of on the very low end of the high density range. Now we've got very expensive land in San Francisco. So while these buildings may be fairly cheap to build, they're still not insignificant and the land cost is very high. So I don't want to make any conclusions or judgments on any of these solutions. I just kind of want to do an overview of what we're looking at and what some of the ideas are. Now these tiny homes, this is a snapshot from 200 options on eBay. You can go to eBay, click buy, get this sent to you overnight at mail and stick it up in your backyard. So this is a, basically we can see this as an infill solution. So I could actually buy one of these if it was legal, stick it in my backyard and everybody in my neighborhood did that. We would increase with no land costs the occupability of our space by 20 units per acre. This is a proposal by a friend of mine. This will never get built because planning regulations, neighborhood regulations, but it's just a good presentation of what it would take to do this a very, very dense kind of tiny unit type of scale of development. And so here we've got about 300 units per acre in a three-story building in a residential type neighborhood and unit costs for that. So just to kind of look at what exists in the world, we can look at all these other options, these other higher density options. So if you look at a mobile home park, this is actually a pretty high density solution. ADU is per acre. The mobile homes are pretty inexpensive and often these are located in more suburban or rural areas and people are paying for these with a monthly lease of the land. So actually the entry cost is much lower. We can look at RV parks about double the density and also kind of a nice temporary solution, a transient solution. Not everybody wants to get into the monthly yearly costs of owning a very expensive unit. So something like this, an RV park, they can drive away with their RV, they can sell it to somebody else. The RV park can move to a different location. So these transient solutions are potentially something we could look at. And so this is a 150 units per acre. So we're approaching that very, very high density solution of the tiny micro homes in a high rise context. And if you wanna get really creative about it, you can start stacking those and get the benefits of doubling up on the space. So this is a solution or an option I guess that is actually pretty popular in the Bay Area. This anchor out in Richardson Bay has been going on for decades. And there's something called the Law of the Sea where any navigable waters, they can't be owned and you have to be able to anchor there for free. So people take advantage of that. They buy a sailboat and you can see some of these are in pretty sore shape as long as they float. It's a viable home and they can get these very cheap and there's people who've been living there like that for decades. And in fact, I live there and at the marina on this sailboat off and on for about eight years. This was a great solution for me because I was going between Alaska and California about half time in each place. I could have this boat in the marina half the year and anchor out or live in the marina the other half of the year. So the real cost of this for me was 2,500 bucks for the boat and I averaged about 150 bucks a month for eight years. So very reasonable cost solution. And at hand I got to sail it around all the time with my friends, which was pretty cool. So there's a lot of really cool solutions coming out, proposals coming out these days. This is one called Podshare that was started by a woman albina back in the LA area. And what she does is to lease a warehouse space and build these very small bed units and then there's a shared cooking space, a shared hangout space, shared storage and bathroom facilities. And you can join this for like 80 bucks a month and then pay a night fee. So and live here for a night. Live here for people who live there for eight, nine months. And the cost is like five to 800 bucks a month. And all these beds can be taken down in about a week and moved to another unit if they need to change it. Now, solutions like this start running into problems with zoning regulations, building regulations. But she's been able to get around those for a while and she's got a number of these around LA and around the country in about 97% accuracy. You've got other of these very creative transient solutions like couch surfing. Now this is a couch surfing is a site kind of like Airbnb but it's people who just have an extra couch they want to visit her. So this is actually a free option. No building costs, no land costs. And you can actually potentially if everybody in my neighborhood did it, there's an extra 20 units per acre. So I wanted to show one of the projects I did in Alaska. This is Homer where Talia's done a project as well. So it's this project in this kind of mixed use area down by the lake. There he's actually great for residentially. You've got a brewing company, you've got a bunch of restaurants and you've also got places where people work. So I bought this pair of lots a number of years ago and put a built a high density development on it. And my idea here was to not do the normal thing in Homer was to build a big house, get half a million dollars for it and move on. I wanted to build a set of places that were more for the income range of people who worked in Homer, fishermen, pilots, people in the healthcare industry, things like that. So I put three units each for about five to 700 square feet on this quarter acre lot. So there's a density of 15 units per acre which is really, really high for Alaska. And it creates kind of a community in us. And it also gives, it's a very simple solution, fairly low cost, it has all the amenities people need and it's in an area of 200 square foot footprint in an area of about five to 600 square feet. And it's got some nice design touches so people can get into this into a nice architectural experience and kind of lift their spirits, lift their living arrangement up for a low cost. And my idea here was to be able to sell these for 100,000 a unit as a condo or something but here we run into regulatory and kind of habit bound barriers where nobody can get a loan for these because the banks require that there are comps and this was the first of its kind in the area so there were no comps. So I ended up having to sell it to a rich developer who now rents it out and makes money off and rent it around. So I recently bought this house in San Francisco after working in the tech for a while and saving up some money and remodeled that. And I applied this kind of densification idea to this project as well. So I get this really beautiful space for myself and the bedroom for myself. In addition, I built out, I built lofts in all the ceiling spaces. I actually had to have nine queen size beds in a 1400 square foot house. Took advantage of the opportunities for solar so the house has zero energy. And also to boot I get two Airbnb units out of it. So here I'm actually adding a density of 20 units per acre to this. I'm also able to pay my mortgage and taxes based off the Airbnb income. And since this is one of the big benefits of a transient solution like Airbnb where when I don't have people in the house I can house my homeless friends. I've always got control of the house so that I can have people over to take showers, do laundry or whatever. So that gets into the homeless support. When I was building this house out I spent a lot of time hanging out with homeless people in the neighborhood. I walked the dog every day and so I just saw a lot of people in the street. And the homeless community in my neighborhood is pretty stable. It's usually the same people all the times. I got to know them pretty well. There's much of my neighbors as anybody else. And I just discovered that the barriers they run into are just so minimal for somebody like me. So for instance, this man, John who lived in his van he's a computer programmer. He runs his computer all day off his batteries and his batteries were wearing out. He would cost $100 to buy a battery. He would never be able to come up with $100. So that is a lot of battery. It's $100. He's a computer programmer. The top is what his glasses look like for the last five years. He couldn't afford to get an eye exam and buy new glasses. So I talked to my optometrist who donated the eye exam. Spent 40 bucks on one of those meal order glasses company and he's set for the next five years on glasses. So very, very, very simple. You were somebody with any money at all to solve these really big problems for homeless people. Of course, having a car requires maintenance. He wasn't able to keep up the maintenance. So he was driving around on basically no breaks. So this is when I started the minimum viable life. To start raising money, we raised 250 bucks. I spent the afternoon changing his breaks and now he's driving safely. But his car was really on its last legs. His solution was to live in his van. He had a very, he's got to really arrange nicely. He's got a safe place to sleep. He's got a safe place to spend the day where he's got internet access. But his van, this is where he was sleeping. His van was just in torrid terrible shape. His hood blew off in the last windstorm. So we had a fundraiser and raised about two grand to replace his van. At least Sienna vans are a dime a dozen. You can get an all day for $1,400. So we bought this one for $1,400. And then since I'm an architect, I had to get Sketchup out, of course, and design out a cool interior space that transitioned for sleeping and for living. So another 250 bucks in a couple of days of work. And we're able to build this out into something reasonable, facsimile of a home. And you know, it's all the amenities of a home, with a desk space, space to hide his equipment, clothing storage, and a little bit of cooking facilities. Now this whole idea of van life has become huge. If you just look up van life on YouTube and find hundreds of videos, there are people that are selling their million dollar homes in San Francisco, buying a $60,000 Mercedes Sprinter van and building it out like this. So I take this, this tells me that van life is actually a legit way of living. The nice thing for someone that doesn't have as many means is this actually gives storage as well as area to sleep, as well as transportation to a job. So to me, van life is really a reasonable option. Now this is what we're dealing with in San Francisco. Really informal housing. People are finding a tent somewhere and just setting them up on a sidewalk somewhere. Now one step up from that, some cities are creating these more formalized spaces, empty spaces in the city, where they provide platforms for people to put their tents rather than being on sidewalks. It's some way to control a little bit the situation and to raise up this situation a little bit. And for instance, this 10th city three in Seattle, Washington, it moves every two months. So it'll be in one park and then it'll move to another place so it doesn't overburden the neighborhood. But it provides a safe space that where the police know where people are so they can protect people, they provide a platform. So it's just, it's one step up from this living on a wet sidewalk. Another step from that, this is an artist in Oakland, California who's just using scrap materials. And whenever he gets a little bit of time, he'll build out one of these little pod units. So it's the sleeping unit, it's got a walk on it, it's got a place to sleep in this place, place to store your stuff. He puts it on wheels and he'll just roll these up to places where people are sleeping in tents. Here's a slightly more formalized version of that in Seattle on an empty lot. And here's a guy that's a retired aerospace engineer who's kind of making a name for himself, experimenting with a bunch of different mobile units like this where he does the same thing, he'll build these and then just bring them over to any homeless person he finds. Here's a unit built by a student in Portland. It's taking up a parking space, but in my opinion, I'd rather see someone living there than a car. So now these seem like really informal and unsustainable solutions, but you've got some cities like this in providing these mobile shower units. Now this is a very, very simple, very cheap and cost effective solution. A couple of these trucks could have showers for everybody, every homeless person in San Francisco once a week. So building on that, I'm trying to do my part with Minimal Vival Life to provide these kind of final minimal pieces for people that don't have that storage and cleaning facilities. So when I made this card up, initially people told me, oh, it looks like you're satisfying the mass allows hierarchy of needs, right? Which basically says that, you know, first thing people are gonna focus on is the physiological needs, then they need safety, then they can focus on the higher needs, like friendship, like giving back to the community. I think a diagram's really important and having these really big things on the bottom makes them seem harder than they really are. They're actually much easier. The people that I know, they need really minimal, they need to satisfy really minimal needs and safety and shelter, and they'll jump right to creating friendships, to wanting to give back to the community. One guy I work with every time I meet him on the street, he tells me how he wants to help me build the next solar plant in Cambodia and he's got at least some new designs for hydropower and then he forgets that I brought a sandwich for him. So the point about this, and that's the reason that I included the info and talk part here on Minimal Vival Life because I think that's as important or more important than everything else. So I think this diagram works a lot better to show that if we build these really easy little pillars at the beginning, it's amazing when we can get back from people. Yeah, that's it. Thank you, I'm Gina Merritt. My company is Northern, we're gonna say Urban Ventures and I'm gonna start the conversation with talking about my company and a little bit about what I do. So my firm basically develops housing and mixed use facilities in the District of Columbia, mainly, but we do work all over the country as indicated on the slide. We work in Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, many states within the urban context and currently we are building 165 units of apartments, actually apartments in retail by a metro station in Maryland in Prince George's County. We also recently finished a $65 million, 348 unit renovation project in Pittsburgh and we just completed actually two weeks ago at the ribbon cutting for a $56 million project which includes a church renovation, expansion, 99 units of affordable housing, two level parking deck, a retail storefront that will include a culinary arts training program as well as a rec center. And that project has three separate owners and three separate financings and we also had to create 15 air rights lots which is a whole big thing in order to make this project happen. And I've also won a number of awards for that specific project because it was so complicated. We wound up winning the new markets tax credit deal of the year award by Novogratik which is a very popular industry periodical. So some of our clients include McCormick Baron Salazar, they're about a $5 billion developer. So we actually do work for national affordable housing developers managing their projects. We also advise many cities, usually smaller cities that have challenges finding a high level of technical real estate expertise so they wound up hiring my firm to help them. And then we work also for a lot of nonprofits, community development organizations and faith-based CDCs. This is a little bit about how our company is organized in terms of disciplines and the services we provide our clients. And this is our company by the numbers. Since everyone loves electrics I figured I'd put a couple of them up on the board. 6,045 units developed, over 7.1 millions per feet. We've received 19 awards, we've served over 18,000 residents. Okay, and to cover today's subject matter. So we're talking about underserved populations so I figured I'd give some historical perspective on a few populations that I actually serve in my work. Veterans, and when we think about the history around veterans, they're usually, or they have been in the past house around their physical disabilities, right? They were put in old soldiers' homes, that's what they were called. That now is like the medical VA. Some of the issues were around disabilities being both physical and mental and substance abuse and really over the last 100 years. There's just been a lack of dedicated resources right to veterans. LGBTQ individuals, some of the history there, which seems crazy, right, is that folks were punishable by death and at some point it was changed. Instead of killing you, they just mutilated you, but that way, then it was eventually designated as a mental disorder. And then of course, even through today we see institutional discrimination, right? And the same, similarly we wind up with institutional discrimination for African Americans, but that history starts from enslavement through what we see today and sort of after the civil rights movement, redlining and reverse redlining. And so, some of the historical perspective around actually housing these folks are right in the 1930s, the government builds public housing really in high-rise, very dense buildings, which lead to urban ghettos. In the 60s they decided that's not the right way to house people. Let's put them in low-rise buildings and move them out to the suburbs. But actually out in the suburbs they weren't very many services for people. And then in the 90s we see going to the Hope 6 program, which is a program where the federal government sponsors financially, the redevelopment of housing, but at that point they really didn't focus on specifically human capital or related issues to housing, which would include like today's programs called Choice Neighborhoods. And the Choice Neighborhoods program also focuses on education, public safety, so basically a comprehensive and holistic approach to redevelopment. Some of the other tools used today are inclusionary zoning, right? Cities where they say in order to get the right to build, you have to provide affordable housing. There's also a focus on mixed income communities and that really is through income averaging where people that make 30%, 40%, 50% of area median income, which is a standard set by the government. I'll use DC for an example. The area median income for DC 100% is around $115,000 a year for a family of four, so 60% of that would be for a family of four making around $62,000. And also today we see a lot of housing typologies that are dedicated to specific populations for the underserved. So some of the context there in terms of people and their challenges today, current challenges for veterans are similar to the past, but we're looking at homelessness, mental health and physical health as challenges for this veteran's population. The LGBTQ and I'm focusing on seniors who have done a project on seniors or working on one which I'll show you later. There are issues around isolation and discrimination, for low income African-American families. They lack access to services, health retail and food, employment training, safe and decent affordable housing and middle-class individuals also have a huge challenge which is lack of access to affordable housing. Middle-class families don't qualify for affordable housing and they can't afford to live in luxury houses. So there's this real gap for middle-class families that might have spent too much money on rent. So as a developer, and from my perspective, the things that I think about when I'm working to house these various populations for veterans, it's needing to concentrate social services for that population so that they have access to those services. Instead of sprinkling veterans that might have, say, substance abuse issues and a family development, you want to be able to house those folks together so that they can have access to services. The same thing with LGBTQ seniors, especially around the issue of isolation and to be able to be housed with folks who have similar issues. It works in terms of sort of a communal perspective to share what it feels like to be isolated into actually clean environment where you get support. Low-income African-American families, their issues around being housed in better neighborhoods, right? Neighborhoods without crime. They can't find better neighborhoods to live in because they're financially feasible. And when they do find affordable housing opportunities, they usually only maintain property and red-line neighborhoods so they don't have access to services. And again, the middle-class family just, they're sort of left out of the equation. So this is a project in D.C. on North Capitol Street. There are 124 SROs, mostly four veterans. And I managed this project actually from the Karmic Bar and Salazar. And there are 17 units in there, for the Department of Behavioral Health Constituents. And then there are 47 just low-income units. And most, if not all of these are subsidized with some kind of rent payment subsidy. And at the property, there's a ton of various services, case management, counseling, employment training referrals. And I had to stick that picture in there of Michelle Obama. Yes, I did get to meet her. So that was awesome. This is a project I worked on in Atlanta, which was a public housing redevelopment. And in this development, 40% of the units were going to remain public housing. And the other 60% were actually going to be market rates. So here's another example of how low-middle income is not served. But in this case, we also had a bunch of different services and amenities for folks that live here. And the development was a 12-acre site, and it was 700 units. This is a project that I won tax credits for in District of Columbia, which is a very challenging thing to do, but this is a 15-unit SRO project. Also, we'll have case management and counseling. And it's basically a communal facility. So there'll be very small units with private baths, but the eating will be in a communal environment. So that's why there's no rendering, because we're still under development just getting started. This is a project I completed, which serves African-American families. One-third of the units are public housing units, all ones, twos, and threes. And here we have Subway Sandwich Shop. At the time, Subway Sandwich Shop was the only fast food establishment that was supported by the American Health Association, a hard association project. And we promised the community that we would put something healthy in there. And it's hard in this neighborhood, which is a much lower-income neighborhood to get services. So we were able to get Subway in there, so we're happy about that. And then we do lots of programs like healthy living, teaching folks about how to deal with hypertension and diabetes. Then my husband actually made me put this slide in, because he said when people see this, they won't believe that that's public housing. And so this is that development that's one-third of public housing. We basically designed it to look like market-rate housing. So most people, when they see the pictures, and I don't tell them what it is, they think it's a condo building in downtown DC, because that's what that looks like, right? But this is folks here make $100 and live in this development. Some people make $100 a month. Some people make $60,000 a year and live in here. So this is a project I've been working on by the Capital Heights Metro. And I put it in here as an example for middle-class individuals. It's one and two bedrooms. But the rent is around $1,500 to $2,500 a month. And if you know anything about DC, the average rent in the nice neighborhoods are more like $3,500 to $5,500 a month. So there's an example where middle-class families live. But in the affordable housing examples that I showed you, the rent there is between $900 and $1,200 a month. So again, middle-class families live. So this is a great example. It's by the Metro. So you can park here and go to work. And these rents are affordable for people that make over $110,000 a year for families. Good afternoon. We're buzzing. Yeah, we're going to go as last. OK. Whatever happened was better. OK. OK, I'm going to try this again. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. OK, so I smushed together a couple of things I care about because I just felt like I was inspired by the theme and the questions that had been sent out prior. And so I thought I would just sort of give you what I hope will be a completely coherent string of thoughts. A lot of my work, I teach in urban planning, but I'm often confused for an architect, which I think is quite a compliment, if I understand, by the architects. And I often work in collaboration with architects and think a lot about the fields of design as a set. Working together. So I'm always interested in power. I'm interested in who gets to make decisions and what are real decisions and what are fake decisions. And I feel like a lot of times planning the field that I often teach in and design will give you three different color palettes, but it's all really the same non-choice. Right. And so when are we in moments where people are really getting to enact their own self-determination in the bill world? I think that's an interesting puzzle. And this flyer really captured me when it first came out. It was right after Katrina in New Orleans. And this group of activists actually, they say they're using a South African slogan, but it's actually a South African disability right slogan that has become an international slogan for the movement, nothing about us without us is for us. And it's really about power. It's who gets to decide what happens in a space. And we're very good planning and architecture at coming in and saying, OK, well, you need my help. So I'm going to make all these decisions for you. And it's going to be great, I promise. And so I've spent a lot of my time thinking about when we get to flip that, when power can be redistributed, and this notion of equity in particular, when we're thinking not only just about equal access to things, but actually building your own wealth, building your own self-determination, how does that manifest in the bill world? Because it's complicated. And so you're all here because you believe on some level in knowledge, you're either getting a credential or giving them or something or other. And we've all been talking about the credentials we have as we introduce ourselves. So we know that in many senses, knowledge is power. And so a big question for me is what counts as knowledge? And how do we think about, and I think Sarah actually brought this in really well, this notion of social history and how we understand a landscape based on the questions we ask and the stories we tell. And this is not a new concept. This is something, so leadership without easy answers is a piece of work that in the 90s was talking about adaptive practice. And we hear this notion of adaptive, complex adaptive systems in the world of resilience to think about dynamic situations and systems and how they change. But the way that it's used in this text, which I recommend highly if you want to geek out on these sort of power sharing dynamics, is actually thinking, OK, well, when the problem is really hard to define. And when the solution requires some stretching and learning, when you have what can be considered a wicked problem or at least one that is really, really complicated and hard to solve, you don't just need technical knowledge. You also need local knowledge. And you need people to be driving their own solution making process. And that is super complicated when it comes to the built world. But here's again a text from about a decade ago that's actually looking at the notion of co-production and in the planning world. So really in this realm, they're defining it in terms of rural community development. And they're thinking about co-production as not only a responsibility for design of a service, in this case of a planning process, but also implementation of that service. So really thinking about how we might frame our questions in participation and then frame those solutions. That's not the way things are structured right now. And so that's a complicated set of challenges. So I spent some time really trying to delve into this world of public interest, social impact, whatever little bit of pop phrasing you want in the design world to really understand, OK, how does this happen? And I surveyed hundreds of practitioners that identify with one of these terms. And I asked them to basically mark out on a continuum from 1 to 10 all of these different terms, because language is fluid. So giving you just like a glossary of terms, and as I was writing a book at the time, is not actually that helpful. And there are glossaries out there that we can refer to, but it felt more important to think about things on the continuum. So I asked them to map out these terms not only from product to capacities orientation, like what's the goal of the thing itself, but also from professionally driven to community driven in terms of who has power in the decision making process. And you start to see this trend between these different bits of language. And then I overlaid it with the language in their literature and what people say about their work and what about other people's work. And it turned out there was these sort of three blobs, one being like things that are accessible. So pro bono design, creative, placemaking, tactical, urbanism, mostly just because they're free, right? Like you don't charge for those services necessarily. But people of color have been overpoliced for guerrilla art and activism in their communities. So it's not actually something that everyone gets equal access to at this point. Just business as usual, making it free doesn't solve all of the problems. And a parklet isn't going to solve our homeless population's problem unless we start actually building beds in it. So we have to push beyond that. Most of what we do is this responsible architecture, which is thinking about our charge to serve in the public interest. But when you are grappling with traditionally underserved communities that have all of the traumas that Gina just told us about that generationally have kept wealth generation from being an opportunity for hundreds of years, you really have to think differently about equity. And so there's a whole realm that I'm sure many of you have heard about in the sort of civil rights movement. You have Whitney Young come and talk to the National AIA Convention in 1968 and say, you are a profession not known for your contributions to civil rights. You are known for your complete irrelevance and thunderous silence. And so in this moment, not surprisingly, the AIA sort of got it together and tried to start thinking through what their response would be. And much of it was about community design. But what's happened is that's typically participatory design, which means you're heard, you're consulted, there's workshops. But you're not necessarily at the decision-making table. Power is not being shared, and outcomes are not necessarily more equitable because of it, right? You still might get gentrified out of your neighborhood. And so how do we kind of look at systems differently? Oh, I'm doing the wrong thing, sorry. And so in the end, I wrote a book. This is the slide that my publisher wants me to put in for you all. But it tells stories of small projects that are actually community driven. So if you wonder what this looks like, there are a lot of projects out there in all parts of the country that are doing this really well. So communities that have been subject to structural inequities are doing their own work and making their own decision-making processes and overcoming a lot of really hard issues because they're doing it themselves. I looked at eight projects in particular. These are typically public micro projects, but they all have some sense of an eye toward systems change. And I won't go into it in depth because we just don't have time, although if you want to geek out with me over cookies later, I will tell you about these projects. But I also mapped out that sort of actor networks because one thing that felt really important, as you hear these stories, is that there isn't just a central figure. In architecture and planning school, we hear about the sort of narrative of the hero, designer, architect, or planner. And that's just never the case. These projects are complicated. I'm sure we could give actor maps that are super cool for all the projects you've worked on. But it's important to think about it that way. And it's important to think about it in school that way. And I think the design build work that you all are doing is a testament to thinking about these relationships and how much that matters. In the end, there were sort of seven lessons from that project that felt important. You have to pay people for their time. Do not ask the low income people that are working six jobs to also come and use their free time when you're getting paid on the weekends to lend their knowledge. Find ways, restructure your budgets. We could talk about that too if you want. Build coalitions is sort of, I think, captured well with the actor networks themselves. But also recognize, and we're doing this more and more, that ecological issues and social issues are really linked. Climate justice is sort of a new concept. But it's one that I'm excited about because it does grapple with these things that have been interrelated and see them more in the sort of global environmental scale with the environmental justice work that's always been place based. Local wisdom is so important. But I hadn't really understood, especially the importance of local wisdom on issues like policing and other things where actually community policing strategies are so much better than most of the top down policing strategies. And that's been proven time and time again. So sometimes we just have to trust. And then think about the micro and the macro in terms of thinking about change, how we make change in different scales. And just to give you one example as I finish, I've also been doing a lot of work with resident driven redevelopment of housing. So subsidized affordable housing and unsubsidized affordable housing are going through these massive redevelopment processes right now, just because it's sort of like time for a lot of the original tax credit properties to get refinanced. And it's really scary to think about millions and millions of units going through another version of urban renewal where communities are displaced. And so we've looked at all of the different systems that are used for building assessment. So here you see it's hard to read, but there's lead in the living building challenge and sites and a lot of the different building assessment systems and landscape assessment systems that you're reading about and working with and getting certified for. And they are important because they're pushing knowledge. They're pushing the building industry. They're setting new building standards in many cases. But they're just starting to think about equity. And they're just starting to think about social quotient quality of life, economic development. And so that's what's being mapped here is the change over time in these systems. And what we did, just to finish up, is as we actually created a tool that was explicitly for housing redevelopment and subsidized housing that would allow groups to build a coalition so the developer and the financiers and the residents can all work together to share power and ideally to even share equity. And we're working with LISC and a few other financial intermediaries right now to try to imagine what that looks like in practice. Thanks.