 All right, hello everyone like to welcome you back to the afternoon session for the housing Conference we're having today called acts of design new housing paradigms in North America We've spent the morning for those of you who are just joining the conference. We spent the morning Looking at work of some architects from Mexico Mexico City who are here today Some of those architects will join us again at the end of this afternoon session for a round table discussion concluding everything so This afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome for our keynote Maurice Cox. It's his first time speaking here at Columbia, so I'm thrilled to have him here Maurice Cox is the director of planning for the city of Detroit He is an urban designer architectural educator and former mayor of the city of Charlottesville, Virginia He most recently served as associate dean for community engagement at the Tulane University School of Architecture and director of the Tulane City Center a university affiliated practice Operating at the intersection of design urban research and civic engagement throughout the New Orleans community Maurice's work with the Talbin School The University of Michigan is directly directly engaging architecture and planning students with the revitalization of Detroit And he's going to present some of that work this afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us Maurice Good afternoon after lunch. I guess I'm the dessert It's great to be here. Thank you Hilary for the invitation. I shared that it's unusual for for me to have a chance to talk about a single topic on the recovery of Detroit So I jumped at the chance to try to frame a little bit what's happening in housing And it makes for an intro be an interesting panel at the end of the day in in contrast to some of the challenges that we saw from Mexico so We're talking I I talk a lot about the search that Detroit is on to Define what an inclusive recovery? Looks like what a comeback story? that Does what other? Revitalization stories have yet to be able to do and to do that Inclusively and so I'm going to show a lot of images, but I don't want to give any impression that these are easy answers This is incredibly complicated to achieve this outcome so We're talking about how do you go beyond inclusion and Make a commitment that in the space of this recovery that it is primarily for those who stayed in the city and So we start from the premise of wanting to retain people at the same time grow the city So what does it mean? What does that kind of recovery look like and what are the? the collateral Challenges to make good on that promise Well just like in 2012 the prognosis of the city was pretty dire in the national Narrative about Detroit being a great American city that was dying before our very eyes Has a whole host of other things that went with it That dictates how we approach the recovery the fear of displacement the racial tensions that ensue when people are jockeying for limited resources in space still Blight and abandonment and For many many years an absence of government government simply was not a player and the largest bankruptcy in American history of an American city just five years ago, so That's the background for this notion of creating one city for all of us and It is both a political campaign But also a promise That we have made that how we're going to approach the recovery is Going to not create Different types of neighborhoods for different types of people but to create one city for all of us Which is effectively a a challenge to integrate the city and we don't think that it's effectively been done yet, so for us it starts with giving people a voice in the Planning decisions that will affect their life so those Almost 700,000 people who remain are critical to our ability to Re-imagine the city in an inclusive way, so if you start from a concept of the zero Displacement that means you have to understand collectively what those who stayed desire So we hold I won't say dozens hundreds of meetings to come up with a framework and to do that you have to have a Staff or group of professionals who are committed to that cause so The planning department is about 40 people now it was six three years ago The majority are people of color the majority are women and they're in leadership positions The majority live in the city of Detroit and over 12 Languages are spoken and it's really key to being able to build an atmosphere of trust and To put it a little bit in historic historical context this image from the 1950s of a African-American middle-class family Walking on a really a tree-lined residential street was synonymous of what Detroit Became for the African-American experience it experienced it with over 200,000 people came in the Great Migration North seeking those quality jobs and It it came to a point in Detroit's History during World War two were 700,000 people were employed in arsenal of democracy building ships and planes and It grew at an extraordinary rate over 200 homes were built in just a 20-year period and a lot of times some of the amenities and services did not accompany them But what's interesting about that is this is the same period in which the FHA was redlining most communities all communities of color and so much so that You can see Through the black dots where African-Americans lived in Detroit And if if you were in that red area You basically were federally sponsored segregation by race and class you could not get a loan to fix up your house or own your house and so you saw an heavy level of light and an expectation that those communities could be removed a Historic occurrence of a developer who attempted to do a new residential subdivision and it was adjacent to a African-American neighborhood and he could not finance the project unless he built a wall To physically separate those two communities And that wall exists today both sides of the wall now are African-American and It speaks to the reality of Detroit today I mean Detroit is the blackest city in America. It's 80 percent African-American 10 percent Latino And 10 percent white and these are the folks who stayed and they are Largely middle-class working-class Families and now they live in all parts of the city So the neighborhoods you see here are of which there are dozens and dozens in Detroit are Majority African-American neighborhoods. These are not the neighborhoods that you see on the Internet But it is the kind of cornerstone the anchor of This black middle class that was built But there is also an extraordinary amount of blight, right? There are still 26,000 single-family homes That are blighted. There's an estimate that maybe 5,000 of them can be saved in Seoul There are about 80,000 vacant parcels and this is all owned under a land bank so that's an important point because There's been a direct correlation between demolishing blighted housing in Strong neighborhoods and the increase in property values and to this day there about 16,000 Houses have been demolished in a four-year period The average is about a hundred houses a week are being demolished And it's largely because the city is so damn big That it's going to take a very very long time to imagine a Residential form that can meet that level of open space So the city's San Francisco Boston Island of Manhattan can fit within The city limits of a population a little under a hundred six hundred and eighty thousand It was once the city of one one point eight million and so Trying to understand what you do to regenerate neighborhoods when you control 23 24 square miles of vacant land is the question, right? and How do you create a neighborhood? That responds a housing that responds to a very different paradigm There is no scarcity of space and There's also no scarcity of housing and so one of the first things we did was put a moratorium on any new single-family housing single-family detached housing until every Existing housing is rehabbed and so every day four houses are auctioned on a website They start in the thousands and they may go up to 20 30 40 thousand and these are houses that many people walked away from during the foreclosure crisis and today 3000 vacant homes have been sold And rehabbed through this program, but it is one house at a time My challenge as planning director is to find a model That builds from the residential single-family residential strength of the neighborhood but also accepts the the land resource as an advantage and To do this not just in neighborhoods adjacent to downtown But to do this in neighborhoods that are miles away from downtown. So I'm gonna show quickly for variations on this theme Having to do with a kind of incremental approach To housing the first has to be housing single-family housing rehab then I'll talk about Commercial corridors and how densifying them and then the idea of taking on an entire neighborhood at a time and building incremental strategy for New construction and then adaptive reuse So the first is the notion of the single-family house And how do you go from one house at a time and one street at a time to one? Neighborhood at a time and so this is a neighborhood the Fitzgerald neighborhood And this is the current pattern and plan for that quarter square mile The city owns over 400 vacant lots in this quarter square mile. That's about 20 acres And the plan is to rehab 100 Houses that are publicly owned were publicly owned and plant over 200 gardens In demolishing all blight so creating a blight-free quarter square mile But having a purpose for every single vacant lot in the neighborhood And so there is no this is like the no-build option. There are no new construction here but the assembly of the Strategies together this strategy was designed by Elizabeth Moss of the Australian architect with a series of productive lots about 150 flowering meadows that are tied to the vacant the rehabbed houses and at the center a park and a greenway and So this is what the housing looks like the average household income in this area is about $30,000 a household which means we're talking about affordable housing whether before Purchase or rent and the idea is that the lot next door to these rehabbed houses will have a garden installed That becomes a part of the ownership model all of the lots and the houses are developed by a single developer Who can five seven ten years from now remove the garden and put a infill house if the market? Would take it and so part of the strategy here was to define the define a typology of Uses that would activate and curate every open space in the neighborhood It certainly has hasn't been attempted at this scale, and it certainly hasn't been attempted in this way This is the development team That won the commission average age 35, and it's They're well on their way to executing this plan At the center of it is a park and this is About 26 vacant lots. This is publicly It's financed through philanthropy publicly managed But the idea is could you Across alleys and across streets turn a series of vacant lots aggregated in the center of the neighborhood Into a coherent park and you're seeing the park under construction And you can begin to see some of the tools that are used to kind of bridge alley street with the various uses Kind of super graphics on the street to as a traffic calming measure full court basketball court Playscapes and ultimately creating a social space that has incredible flexibility and Genuinely kind of brings people together and so the housing strategy is Anchoring is being anchored by a public space as the center of the housing strategy then the companion pieces to it is within a 20 minute walk of that park is A shopping a neighborhood shopping district so a streetscape housing rehab and mixed use and A greenway that connects these to those various assets The the second part is the Commercial corridor and the idea of medium density mixed use being aggregated in a walkable area Serving single-family neighborhoods. So the next thing that we did was we directed all multifamily housing to be located within these Project areas so you cannot receive financing for multifamily housing if it does not Land in one of these areas in support of that single-family housing Strategy, but these are the streets. This is what the streets look like very typical streets that have been The fabric has been Demolished and they are very auto-centric Our plan is to rezone them to support a kind of walkable pedestrian oriented development pattern in fact the whole concept of the frame is That you should be able to walk or bike within 20 minutes of your home To any of the daily services that you need And to do this that means without a reliance on a car and that's a new paradigm for the Motor City And so here you see an attempt to construct almost from scratch a In many ways traditional neighborhood shopping district the three buildings you see there are all The first to be RFP'd but it's also going back to a time probably in the fifties when Those streets did serve a purpose as local shopping districts and how to do that again So this is the first one will be under construction on this curtsville in the corner and mix use Development that will happen there. So it's about 90 units a deep level of affordability About 60% of the area median income as well as market rate with Retail on the ground floor But also the question of how you incrementally add density to Area that is largely single family. So we were interested. Can you put a 12 unit development? that has affordable housing and townhouses so the eight townhouses there for Affordable units the affordable units are above the shop And they have the biggest windows and the most privileged point in the development. So We're trying a number of things one what should development look like as an increment And how can you get affordability in even the smallest? Intervention in a neighborhood Then of course as you move on to the commercial corridors The density increases very gently So we're talking about like a maximum of six or seven stories that transform those autocentric corridors into Pedestrian oriented corridors and Two of these projects are public public sugar hill and brush house and Gratitude and eastern market gateway are private and One of our one of our goals here is to have these be exemplars of what design excellence should look like as these corridors are constructed with a pedestrian orientation and part of the attraction is We're spending almost 50 million dollars and re Configuring those streets so with wider sidewalks with trees with street furniture as an incentive to the private sector to Locate in this walkable floor to six blocks stretch throughout the neighborhoods The third would be housing Built on the increment. These are largely new construction projects that are adjacent to downtown and the idea of how do you build in For an incremental growth of neighborhoods over time using housing as the foundation block And so brush park is a quarter square mile outside of the downtown and we're talking about the missing middle density in that can exist in Next to a single family house and You're you can see the pattern of Connected small-scale streets and lots that has been eroded over the course of a century and There are a number of these incredibly state stately mansions still left that give some character But this is this is a 20-minute walk from downtown The city owns about 60% of the land And the question here is can you build a dense community here, which is not? Auto-centric and builds off of transportation innovation and create a Full-fledged neighborhood that is in itself a laboratory of housing types For all all incomes in all ages It has the benefit of being next to the queue line Which is a new rail line down woodward and you can see its adjacency. So just like with the installation of that it has become a transit oriented development opportunity and There's a pretty clear acknowledgement of the to the the transit oriented development There's also a trails oriented development and both are drivers for redevelopment largely because people want to live next to them and exercise various modes of Alternative transit and so I'm going to show two developments that respond to this public infrastructure Brush Park was a it was about eight and eight and a half acre block and a half a site that was RFP for developers and the winning proposal Set the stage for this idea of incremental growth that I talked about so you'll see part of the premise here is that Contemporary buildings can sit side-by-side with historic buildings that you can respect the scale of Traditional street and that you can have a variety of housing types and incomes living on the same block and this is What traditionally has happened, right? This is one building one developer double-loaded corridor And this is what our zoning our current zoning allows and we wanted to see if we could challenge still operating with a one develop One developer concept, but if we could dictate the form And allow for a variety of uses and types And so this is the outcome of a form-based code. So you can see This is one developer it has five architects is 24 buildings in about a four hundred and ten Units and this is our test case to see if we can create a Built a neighborhood by increment And it was guided by its form-based code specifically for those blocks a block and a half And here you can see the results Both in terms of flats which are taller buildings on the north-south streets Duplex a duplex Carriage homes townhomes and historic homes all existing on the same block with no parking lots And so starting with the three historic mansions The photographer of Agar came year after year after year to document to decline of Detroit I think he was surprised in 2015 when he came back and that same Ruin was fully restored But this is the context that we're working in and the question is can you restore each of those? Which you're starting to see them completing now. They're not a single mansion. They are multiple units in in these Former mansions and then the next question is could you read? the architectural character of those historic buildings and Build something denser next to them. So that's a quadriplex of four units And then if you pull back you can see how the Composition of the street is being made in terms of the rhythm the meter the front yards All of the kind of pedestrian scale qualities that you get in a traditional neighborhood But done with an architecture of our time Then the question is can you Create a different scale and a different affordability on the back sides of those same houses And you're starting to see the muses here Where the smaller units exist? It serves both as a alley parking alley, but also as an address And these are just People are just starting to move into these so you're talking about 800 square feet On the same block as something with 2,000 square feet and this is how we're getting the income variety and the affordability and then Lining these linking these north south is a greenway a pedestrian And bicycle greenway so literally to walk through the neighborhood you pass through these various scales of of and incomes And then of course right across the street the first affordable senior housing Is being placed and and instead of having a meeting room on the ground floor. It's ground floor retail With seniors above across the street So the idea is that families young professionals families with children seniors are all living within close proximity And you can see That it's been recently it's just completing construction I think a particular interest of ours is the issue of scale And how you can begin even in a courtyard building. This is the first one that has Underground parking all the rest has been surface Also under construction taller buildings on the north south street and then even the taller buildings of six stories This is by loha who will be speaking later today again How do you acknowledge and respect the scale? Both of the townhouses, but also the importance of the primary street that will Be lined with retail and this is the final version as it will be constructed so our task was how do you take this one and a half block and now take it to the entire neighborhood and So this is where the form-based code comes in it talks about the character of each street north south Having taller buildings east west the shorter ones. This was traditionally how you would interpret the zoning codes This is only two pages of 30 pages But this is the new zoning code it's two pages And we've taken what would have been a 15-step process to getting approval to now a three step process and this is working Through the planning commission as we speak it has a series of nine typologies that can be placed throughout the neighborhood They give you an understanding of how the lot should be laid out the level of density is Variable according to how many units you can get in and so now we can play out a scenario of how this neighborhood might change Over time and this is one configuration Having done this work. We then put it out for RFP to see What the first Second block could would yield with these guidelines and you can start to see some of the results fairly dense block three different types greenways and permeability through the center of the block and the again 180 units on this block and a variety of types both in terms of urban studios to Taller flats with retail on the ground floor Another element that looks at some historic structures on site This is the result both keeping the historic Components and adding to that density If this is the first small or parking garage to be done in the neighborhood are required to have a liner building of townhouses in front of them And you can begin to see what this area would look like the level of affordability out of the 626 units 181 are affordable the parking ratio as only 450 parking in this in this assembly And then as we build out the neighborhood the next step you can begin to see how this neighborhood will appear Over time and so we think this is going to be one of the most mixed-income neighborhoods in Detroit If not the nation when it's finished and it will literally be a laboratory of typologies for medium density Housing So the next one I want to show is Lafayette Park and Lafayette Park some of you may know It as the city in the park designed by me spandero. It's the largest collection of His work in the world on a single site and what's Interesting to me about the story is this is Detroit's Chapter of urban renewal. This was a finely grained Urban neighborhood called Black Bottom This is what it was when it was demolished and Lafayette Park was being erected So it had all of the traditional components of a vibrant neighborhood in the mid 20th century and this is what became of it I-375 the highway to facilitate movement out to the suburbs This placing over 400 African-American owned businesses 7,000 families lost their home Right and these are stories of people Who had been forced to live in those restricted areas and then systematically removed and so our question is like how do we reconcile that history as planners and urban designers So how do you go from what Black Bottom was to what Lafayette Park is now? Lafayette Park is probably one of the most successful examples of a mixed income neighborhood. This is one of the Experiments that work There's rental housing There's home ownership through co-ops there are three four different typologies within this neighborhood around a park and So the question is there there are some things to emulate about how this modernist Neighborhood was built and can we right there? There's an equal equation of landscape to architecture. There are Courtyard houses at a certain price point. There are town houses. I will tell you I live in one of those townhouses and You have the presence of the landscape and so For us The question was how do you get back some of the connectivity of the historic neighborhood as it develops? And what do you do with this highway? Which has come of age is over 50 years and there's a question about whether it gets rebuilt As is or whether it is a rethought and so our our intention was to demolish the highway Which is this was the plan before I got there to refurbish it and instead to emulate Of an urban boulevard Many of these we know and love in the northeast Could you build a residential neighborhood that reconnected Lafayette Park to downtown? So we commissioned Michelle Devine from Paris to look at this idea of an urban boulevard How could you create manage the traffic as well as utilize? the the hole for potential parking and other uses and so This is a project which is in the pipeline to be funded in 2022 the question is could you entice developers to build towards that future? Today and you're looking at Lafayette West I'm going to just talk a little bit about that notion of mixing both their linear urban boulevard with higher density housing with a series of connected streets back to downtown and the area in the box is the first development to happen and so you're seeing a mixture again of four different types a high rise to mid-rides buildings townhouses and carriage houses around a series of smaller public spaces parks that face the street and Try to aspire to the modernism of the mid-rise Mid-rise and high-rise curtain wall building with a lower-rise brick building again three different Architects working on a five-acre site And this will be under construction in the spring And is ready to go Of course the incredible irony of this is that all of the developers of the Areas around Lafayette Park are African-American So I think there's a little bit of poetic justice happening there so The other piece Have is along the trail the de Quinter cut So I'm going to talk about above the cut, which is the one one of two developments that are happening there This was the de Quinter cut about 10 years ago Today, it's a three mile bike and pedestrian Corridor that's about 20 feet below the the street level Used to be a rail corridor that led to the river and our question is could you use that to leverage a mixed income urban Intervention along the cut and would would you attract development? Based on a walking and biking trail and so the project The first one is this one on the Joe mule site is at the intersection of Gratiot and the de Quinter cut and you can see The building being used to form public space first and foremost so About 180 units of housing There's a kind of interior court for parking. There are liner buildings on all sides but its primary role is to create a public realm and Create a intersection between the Park and a kind of urban place And you're seeing as it transitions up from the cut to the level of the housing and Making of a public space With kind of retail pavilions along the side Also aspiring to the industrial archaeology of the de Quinter cut allowing housing to come right up to the edge the way some of the industrial buildings do and Those will be townhouses for sale And then the last is housing and preservation so this theme of having a riverfront having a city one city for all of us Is exemplified as well by our vision for the riverfront that it's for everyone It's one of the most diverse river funds you will see and as we envision this rather large park Could we also Understand and keep the historic fragments That still remain on the corridor as it builds up towards a transit corridor a higher density on Jefferson So the first out the gate were a number of historic structures That were there and we put it out for an RFP with the provision that we wanted things to be kept But we also wanted to find a way to increase the density on the site so that the It's it's economically viable And so we have allowed for doubling of the density on the sites and gave clear indications of kind of issues of architectural character And this is the first building to be renovated and added to it's called the stone soap building This is it in existing conditions and this is this is the proposal that has won Which is about 95 units of housing? Retail at the ground floor and another housing type in the on the second and third of the historic building This is it from another view And this is the mass before so the conditions were keep everything that is there and increase the density with an eye towards creating an inclusive Property development so there are 30% affordable in this unit So the idea is that even on the riverfront we are aspiring to create that mixed mix of incomes for all and That's really how we're interpreting what this means one city for all of us Housing is clearly the driver desired a direct public investment in a way to incentivize private development and then hold everyone accountable to creating a more inclusive vision and recovery Thank you