 But perhaps when I think, or when I experience in my surroundings these types of contrasts between what's affordable and what's not, I'm immediately taken to Manhattanville in close proximity to Columbia. And to see on one side of Broadway, the new campus buildings, my rental piano with glass and it's very modern look. And on the other side to see the Manhattanville NYCHA houses. It seems to me that those are perhaps very radically different approaches to architecture. But looking at your body of work. It seems that you have tried to bridge that divide, and you have tried to incorporate elements of interior design of art, both in private and public spaces. Would you say this is a correct description of what you have been trying to do. Yes, you have to look at the history again of affordable housing and you look at the context. If you look at NYCHA housing, you know that was developed in the 60s and 70s, you realize that the idea was to be as expedient to with the available resources that cities had. Particularly in New York, the idea was to build as quickly for as many people as possible, without looking at style, without looking at amenities, without really looking at how these communities came together. So you fast forward to the 21st century and look at things like Manhattanville and before Manhattanville, what was there, right? I mean, the neighborhood was really a manufacturing district that was with, in fact, we were very fortunate to have worked on two of the projects in Manhattanville with Renzo Piano and Davis Brody. So we're associate architects on those projects. But the idea is that when NYCHA was built was NYCHA was developed. The idea was just housed as many people as possible. But now the thinking with affordable housing is to provide social housing, housing that would empower people when they move there, when they live there, and that would be integral with the communities that they're situated in. The thinking with that now is to not make the affordable housing look like leftover housing or make it look like it was designed with very little dollars. The idea is to essentially look at how one would make affordable housing look like it's contextual, it's market rate. It reflects what the design of the times are and it reflects what any level of building would look like in that particular area. So when you look at the contrast between Manhattanville and the NYCHA buildings, you have to take time into consideration and you have to take the mechanisms that were available to develop those projects into consideration. Now the mechanisms that the city is using is really a public-private partnership. In other words, a lot of the affordable housing projects that are developed have some kind of tax credit. So there's the private dollars that are coming into those projects. So there's the need and there's a push to make the projects perform and look better than what they used to look like, being that they were solely funded by the federal government and the cities. So yeah, you have to look at time, you know, time is something. And the interesting thing with New York City is that because the city is not growing in, well, it is growing in terms of its population, well, pre-COVID, but it's growing horizontally. So a lot of sites are being reused, right? They're being recycled. So when you're recycling a site, you have to relate the site to what's there. Otherwise, eventually what will happen is that you have to demolish projects that are not performing so that you can essentially bring up the style in projects that are being designed and built now. So a lot more of that is going on before it starts to change. And one final question for this starting round before I open the floor. Thinking about how these projects perform over time, one of the things that are plaguing NYCHA housing right now is how poorly many of the units have aged in terms of materials, in terms of maintenance. How have you approached this issue in your projects? How have you strived to ensure the longevity of the projects? Well, yes, that's a very, very good question. You know, everything has a lifespan. If you think about it that way, you know, with buildings, the lifespan of the skin of the building could last thousands of years if it's properly maintained, right? Mechanical systems have their own lifespan. Even the investment and the resources that come out of these buildings in terms of rents and maintenance are tied to these lifespans, you know. So that if you imagine that NYCHA, which was built in the 60s and 70s is now almost 50 to 60 years old, right? You realize that those systems have essentially atrophy in order to continue to maintain and they were built at different times with different codes and different thought forms in terms of building. If you don't have the resources, the public resources or the financial resources or the political will to continue to maintain those buildings, they atrophy, they go down. Then you then think about how they're being paid for. If the rents or the resources, the income that comes out of those buildings are not commensurate to the cost of maintenance, those projects are essentially going to atrophy. So NYCHA, I believe, is in a lot of trouble. There has to be a new way of thinking about how to renovate these buildings, to bring them up to modern standards and to just bring the systems up so that they're much more cost effective. Just look at mechanical systems alone. The mechanical systems in a lot of these buildings, okay, are 50, 60 years old. Let's even say they would change a couple of times. They're maybe about 25 years old. They are gas gozillas if you want to compare them to cars, right? Whereas the new systems that are available are unitized. Each apartment has its own mechanical system. Whereas with these bigger buildings, you have mechanical systems, I'm talking specifically about the HVAC or heating, cooling and ventilation systems, tied to the building. These are big, big investments to make, to revamp them. So essentially what they've been doing is just to continue to try to maintain them to these possible standards. What we do, and we haven't done a lot of NYCHA projects. In fact, I don't recall doing any NYCHA projects where we've done some public projects with, and in fact we have some on the boards now with HPD, Housing Preservation Development. And what we're doing with these buildings that were built at the turn of the century, they were tenement buildings. They were renovated in the 60s. They've now come to the end of their effective life cycle as far as mechanical systems, electrical plumbing and all that stuff is concerned. These buildings all had individual HVAC systems. Now what we're doing as we go back to renovate them is that we're making the units much more, they got renovations, we're making them a lot more insulated. We're providing better performing windows. We're also unitizing the ventilation systems and the mechanical systems so that if one breaks down, it's literally plug and play. You can essentially take that unit's mechanical system and change it so that it doesn't affect the rest of the building. What that does is it lowers the cost, the effective cost of maintaining the building. And then the good thing about that too, finally, is that these projects are becoming HDFCs. You know, essentially they're going to be sold to the residents when they're done. That's a big component in housing, a big component in the way you maintain buildings because when people own their residences, when they own their homes, they tend to take care of them a lot better than if they were just tenants that were renting. So I think the model that eventually a lot of these public, large public buildings will have to look at is figure out a way to do home ownership. One of the other things I'll end with this one is in France now there's several projects that are similar to NYCHA. They realized that they'd also come to the end of their effective lifespans, particularly with insulation, which is a big issue with NYCHA. Windows are leak, walls that are really not properly insulated. So they're essentially wrapping these buildings with a curtain wall. They're wrapping them with curtain walls to create a buffer zone between the curtain wall. Now these curtain walls have also opened spaces that the residents could now come to and, you know, they're claiming more outdoor spaces and they're creating these sort of insulated spaces with buildings that were otherwise just like literally sieves. They just, you know, they just let out the air, let out all of the environment in the apartment. So there are ways of retrofitting these buildings to make them much more contemporary with curtain walls now the facades now look a lot more modern people now start to engage with the building in a totally different way. And it lowers their costs in maintaining the building and that translates to lowering the cost of the residents in terms of what they have to pay for their utilities. That was a lot. Yeah, yeah. I want to take one of the things you said because you were mentioning HDFCs and, oddly enough, Jenna had a question about that. I was just saying that the lab has recently done some work, looking at HDFCs in Harlem and some of the surrounding neighborhoods. And I was just curious whether you had any experience working on HDFC projects and if so what you think are some of the kind of possibilities and challenges facing HDFCs now. I graduated from Columbia in 84 right in 85 from the master's program and mark right in 85 I, I've heard about this project that was an HDFC in Harlem on 151st Street and a group of people had come together and they with their sweat equity were planning to renovate it. And as the architect young body architect rising architect from Columbia, I decided to join the team and help in designing the, the units, we then started working sweat equity, literally, in working on the building. We did it that for about six months and realize that we didn't have the resources or the experience to finish the project with, you know, laid out the floors laid out the walls, etc, etc. And so we went to, I think it was you have at that time, and saw some funds, which we then use to get a contractor to build 10 units. And, you know, we've had that the those apartments since 1991, we completed in 1991, I'm on the board of that HDFC now. And so I know the ins and outs of the project. There are advantages and there's some disadvantages. The advantage is that it creates home ownership. Right. And that is changed the neighborhood. While we were doing that several other buildings on the block, we were converted into HDFCs. And the block at that time was a very, it was a, I would say a devastated block, but because of those HDFCs, it became stabilized. Yeah, because people now took care of their neighborhood, they knew, they knew their neighbors, they knew that they had to work with the police precinct if there was drug activity on the block. And essentially, to me, it was a win-win. The disadvantage, of course, is that you would, you know, over the years, we found what we just said earlier that, you know, systems age. And, you know, the people in the HDFCs who've also aged their income is also being somewhat restricted. So we constantly try to minimize the maintenance fees so that it was commensurate with what we needed at the time. It wasn't like, you know, so you're not charging $2,000 as maintenance, you're charging like $700 just because you knew you had to keep the boilers going, you had to heat the hallways, you had to light the building, you had to clean the building. You know, all of those things that were needed. But as the systems have aged, so has the need to increase the maintenance fees. And that has been quite a challenge. So one of the things that we've been thinking about is looking at other ways of sourcing income to subsidize those sort of maintenance issues. So as buildings age, they become more expensive. And that's a concern. And that's something that we need to start talking to the city to see if there are other ways to offset that. One final note about HDFCs, and this is very, very, very important as far as I'm concerned, is that if you have lived in a building that has sort of sustained you for a period of time, and you get to a point where you need to move on, right? If the program is designed to allow you to sell, right, at a market or maybe below market, it helps people to move on to another stage, right, allows other people to come in to buy the unit at a lower cost. So if you're selling the HDFC, you know, say, I'll give you an example, say, for example, there's a, the market rate cost one apartment, a two bedroom apartment on in my block is like, it says 700,000. Okay, because it's an HDFC and there's some kind of restriction to sell to somebody in a limited income bracket. You could sell that for 300,000. If you bought the apartment for 250,000 you spent over the years, who knows whatever to to maintain it. You at least are off better off than just leaving the apartment because you've only rented you've only been a tenant in the building. So ownership is as far as I am concerned is absolutely, absolutely, absolutely important, particularly inner city developers. And one last thing I have in the late early 2000s, we worked on brownstones 32 brownstones in Hallow that we purchased with the developer for a dollar. To redevelop those brownstones fix those brownstones for about 3,400,000 300,000 when the projects were done and sold to and the this program was that it was owner occupied brownstone with maybe four levels, and you would have, you know, one or two levels for the owner, and you would rent off the other three levels, so that they could use the income from that to pay for the mortgage. Right. So these were sold at almost market rate prices at that time. So these owners were able to come into the community, have a mechanism to sustain their building and stabilize the buildings because they were owners. And now those brownstones are selling for a lot more than than what they initially bought it for so I'm a big advocate for home ownership. And HCFC has learned to do that. Thank you have a question. So in the topic of home ownership. I understand that it's like the path to better maintenance and more care and more community. However, in the, in the instances where it's impossible to have every every unit owned would there be design elements or design tactics that would help the residents get like would help give the residents ownership of their space. And then public housing is usually very monotonous in style. So like the overarching style and, well, yeah, the design of the housing itself doesn't give a sense of ownership, either. I don't know if that made sense. It's a great question. It's a great question. Yeah, obviously home home ownership is the, you know, is a plan a let's call that plan a right, but plan B is that, you know, a majority of public housing social housing, you know, affordable housing is not home ownership right. So the trend now as far as I'm concerned is to provide better services in this buildings. Okay, so you want to look at. So virtually everything that we do now are mixed use projects where there's a community facility or commercial on the base of the building, and then residential above. So what that does is that it limits it does several things it allows people to have services in the building. The mix use also allows to lower the cost of maintaining the building, which also lowers the cost for the residents, when they have to pay for their utilities. We also look at making the buildings as green as possible, you know, providing solar panels, you know, providing, you know, you know, much more environmentally friendly materials, so that the building is green. So that again it's lowering the cost, it's creating less of a larger carbon footprint, and it's making the health and welfare of people who live in the building, much better so that lowers the, the pressure on the healthcare system. So in other words, by designing buildings that are much more holistically tied to the community, you're also creating a sense of identity for people who live in the building, because you're integrating the building into the fabric of the community. So one of the things that I do personally as being, you know, I paint, right, I'm an artist. And what I do is that the paintings that I do are related to the projects that I design. I use the paintings to figure out the essence of the community essence of the site, before we essentially, before, before we actually embark on the design process, or it goes throughout the process. What I do at the end is I donate those paintings to the building. I install them in the buildings. And I found out that people tend to feel as if, just because you've got some kind of art in the hallways, they feel as if it's their own. They latch on to the building as if it's their own. They defend it as much as they can. Things like daycare centers in buildings. We're doing this project with WXY, which you talked about just now one. It's on a five, almost five acre site. It's about 740 units. The base of the site is going to be a large open space that are linked to the neighborhood so the neighborhood can actually use the base. But it also has things like grocery stores. It has a primary school. It has urban health, which is a health facility. It has a bank. It has a brewery. It has a maker space. It's got all sorts of things on the base so that residents don't have to go far. They don't have to commute to get to the services that they need. So creating this sort of mixed use environment is very, very important. Finally, again, mechanical systems are important. I'll give you another example. Just the idea of being able to control your thermostat is an empowering device, right? So that if one apartment, typically, like we said, NYCHA buildings, they have one boiler. The boiler blasts, you know, what, 90 degrees into the apartment or 80 degrees. Some people are hot. They leave the windows open. That's a cost to someone, right? Some people are cold. They turn on their stoves just so that they can keep their apartments warmer. But if you make these apartments and give them their individual temperature controlling systems, you've empowered those people because they can now keep their temperature at whatever degrees they want it and turn it off if they don't want it. That benefits the building. Ventilation, just ventilation. You know, I'm sure you've all been to buildings where you walk into the hallway and it smells like somebody's cooking and it's really nice, right? Or it's really gross. But again, with newer buildings, we do individual what's called unitized ventilation systems so that you're not sucking air out of the building consistently, which is a big cost to the building. But each person's apartment is ventilated. The bathrooms are ventilated according to their needs. If you go into the bathroom, you turn on the vent or it comes on automatically. It's ventilated. If you close the door, it stops ventilating. Same thing with the kitchens. So some things, they've all become comprehensive strategies that are being done now to make sure that people, lighting or even daylight in the apartments, bigger windows, shaded windows when they face south, controlling the views. All those things make people feel like they're part of a community. Things like laundry rooms and making those laundry rooms adjacent to open spaces so that they become social gathering spaces. Make people feel like they're part of a bigger corporate experience that's done to benefit their lifestyle. I know there's a hand raised, but I just want to give a shout out tomorrow who earlier this year actually diagram prone building and identified the laundry room and paintings on the hallways the spaces of tenant engagement and community so Absolutely. It's wonderful to hear that. But yeah, I'll step back because I know there are other questions and particularly from core three students here and. Yeah. Hi. Hi, Victor. Thank you for the conversation. Yes. I'm being advanced fight so it might be a little bit through the lens of a larger question architecture that a lot of the architecture approaches sometimes I was also looking at the poster of the event that it was like all color green. I was just thinking of like the naivety of architecture that sometimes attached green spaces. Therefore, it's a good thing like cliches pitfalls that could happen when we do design housing. If nowadays, what is the approach that allows for knowledge allows for respect to strengthen communities. Because I also think that a lot of the conversation on the Fridays is that the architecture or the architect has a tent, but they doesn't follow through because of management or maintenance. So what is the line that architecture can act upon and then after when we release and some not my not my responsibility but for the management or for the government. You know, that's that's a very, very profound question. It's it's really about the role of the architect, you know how powerful is the architect right how what what what do we do to affect change. And how can we affect change. And, you know, we're essentially saying that not everything is the same. So let's look at the past structure in a development. How, how does a project get developed, right, particularly in. If you want to talk about social housing. One, it starts off from the political will, right. So it starts off from political will in most cases, particularly in larger cities. Where the there's no political will, it then lends to market forces. Okay. And those market forces are combined with some kind of political will that is not as great as the one in cities where they want to subsidize so you could say that in a like Baltimore, for example, in Maryland, where they may not have the resources to subsidize projects, they tend to say okay we'll give you subsidies in land, not in cash, whereas in New York City, they'll give you subsidies in cash, right. So, but those that cash is coming from the political will of the mayor saying I want 200,000 units of housing at all costs. Okay. Okay, so now it boils down to who's controlling the resources to develop those projects. Okay, and how you as the architect can make a difference. I'll give you a particular example. We're working on a project right now, where the political wills there, the money is there, although it's dried up somewhat because of the fact that the city is spending a lot of money on public health, but it's there and this particular project had like 75 units in it and they asked us to redesign it and replace it with 75 units. Now you have to realize that the codes now are a little different because, you know, kitchens are bigger, hallways are bigger, bathrooms are bigger, you know, you have to adapt to ADA or handicap issues or requirements. So it was literally impossible to do that. But the agency that was involved was adamant that we had to give them the same number of units. So we had to, as the architects, convince them that it wasn't possible. That's one. Secondly, the agency was used the same systems in the past. Let's use hydronic boilers for the building. We had to convince them, educate them to an extent that it was better to use unitized mechanical systems. You know, you know, smaller heating and cooling VRF systems that would create this closed wall system without vents in the windows or without using window units so that, you know, essentially throwing money out the window with the heating and cooling of the apartments. We had to convince them that we needed to do better insulated walls and better insulated windows. And we had to follow it up with numbers to show the benefits on the back end in terms of what the savings would be, not only to the agency, to the management company, and eventually to the residents. But once they saw that, they bought into it. So in other words, our role as architects is to also educate our clients. And although most of these residents, when I say clients, I'm talking about the people who are disbursing the funds to build a project. But at the end, the residents may not know who you are, but your role is to try to give them the possible best and to align yourself with developers or city agencies that want to create equity, that want to give their clients the best. And, you know, I think right now the city is on the right path in terms of looking at materials. In fact, that project that we were talking about, once we gave them the impetus to go to the unitized systems, they've now adopted that. So now they're using that with their other projects. So that has a larger influence. So I don't know, did I answer your question that your role is, you know, to be diligent? Your role is to also educate your clients, you know. A lot of people, and I'm not saying every client is like that or every agency is like that. Some agencies, regardless of how much you do, will want to take the path of least resistance and will want to get as much out of the project as they possibly can. So did that answer your question? Yes, thank you. Okay. And on this matter of the influence of political will and the role that architects and planners to some extent have, we have a question in the chat from Hayes. Yeah, it seems that a little bit from where your answer to the previous question ended, but often in the debate over affordable housing and high demand cities, there's a tension between two schools of thought from where I said there's a contention that says that we need to focus on a massive expansion of affordable housing in order to address the large backlog of applicants, but then there's another contingent that says that the relaxation of zoning rules up zoning wealthy neighborhoods and neighborhoods with transit will result in a gigantic spike in market rate housing that will flood the supply of housing in New York City enough to bring the prices down sort of across the board. And this debate is really contentious online, especially the both sides are bring these critiques where the one side will say that new affordable housing is really prohibitively expensive to meet the demand at scale. But other other critiques say that wealthy neighborhoods are really good at resisting up zonings. And, and this can sometimes lead to these zonings being displaced to places like Williamsburg, which saw a lot of gentrification after their rezoning a couple decades ago. So I guess my question is, if you're familiar with that, that argument and where you fall kind of along it. Yeah, I, I believe. I was just going to say that there was a, our last week's discussion was actually on displacement and rezonings. And so just to say that the recording will be online soon but also that if we could ask you to kind of answer, but from the timeline on that tension where you engage with the quality versus quantity of it is a weird fit in neighborhoods and I know you discuss with Joanne, the ways in which good housing and quality housing can engage and activate its surrounding and in particular in black and brown communities but also as Hayes's question points out sometimes there's a desire and political will to locate housing in fancy or wrong way, rich neighborhoods that often exclude affordable housing otherwise. You know, with the, with the pandemic, there's been a massive reduction in real estate, you know, real estate demand in New York City, particularly in the office housing sector and in the office, commercial office sector, right. So they're advocates now that are looking at and are suggesting that, you know, some of these office buildings that are mostly in prime areas, right, converted or zoning is allowed to convert them into affordable housing projects. Of course, you know, there are a lot of people that are, you know, that would be against it, and then there should be a suggestion to add, there's a suggestion to add social services like they can center schools, you know, healthcare and all those sort of things into into those sort of projects. But then then there's this issue where recently with the pandemic, there's the mayor has used some hotels as housing for the homeless in certain upscale neighborhoods, and these people were against that. So essentially the mayor essentially backed off and took them out. So the issue is that I think there's always a need for balance. If you segregate affordable housing in a particular zone without providing services, then those neighborhoods become slums. If you segregate market rate properties where you cannot have young people, young graduates coming out of school, nurses, teachers to live in those places, you now have to transport them from one location to the other one. And it becomes so inefficient and not balanced that you need to create a balance. So when you have market rate and affordability blended together or melded together, you see more services that are, you know, accessible to everyone. So I think the debate is that if you provide more home ownership and you create a balanced environment, obviously you're going to have a much more equitable environment. But the approach in the past was to segregate and that we're seeing is just the wrong news. Obviously things like zoning now rethinking zoning and the whole idea of trying to create this 15 minute community where, you know, it's all walking around, you know, your, your epicenter your home to get to services is, is an approach that we're saying to look at and you now think about zoning that has a mixed component that allows commercial to be a part of the, the building which allows to which causes a reduction in commuting time. So all of these things I think come together to create a much more equitable environment. I, I want to ask one of the questions that Bernadette also wrote in, in the chat, and it's about these perceived trade off between making sure the units are affordable and providing additional amenities that we're seeing now are critical, not only for public health reasons but also to reactivate these neighborhoods and to perhaps to use a phrase that you used in the past to humanize these types of housing developments. So how to address that trade off? How are they, are those types of amenities really that prohibitive in terms of cost, or are they just not part of the traditional way to approach affordable housing design? So let me rephrase your question. The first, yeah, I think there's several questions in that one question, how do you make these apartments or these, these projects affordable, right? Is that the first one? How do you make it affordable? And then how do you provide amenities that are affordable, that encourage developers to build those amenities, right? Okay, okay. So you have to look at the mechanism that is used to build these, and those mechanisms differ from state to state. In certain states, like I said earlier, in like a place like in Maryland, they will give you land at like a dollar, a thousand dollars. Okay, that's their contribution. In New York City, they would give you cash, essentially, for the apartment, and then how does the city get its money back? It's through tax credits, and it's through taxes down the line. Okay, so the incentive, when the city gives the developer the incentive, the grants to do the project, they also come with restrictions. One would be you've got to provide a laundry room, you've got to provide, you know, a little quality housing program. For example, you have to have a laundry room, you have to have a community room, you have to have some daylight in the hallway, you've got to get trees, plant trees on the street. So these sort of amenities come to it. Now, if the city also provides grants, they also want to now, now with the new term sheet, to have about 30% of the people who would be living in the building to be formally homeless or people with special needs. So there's always that caveat. Remember that the city is giving the money to build the building. Okay, now the mixed use part of the building or the other amenities, such as the commercial or the community facilities that go to that. The owners is then placed on the developer to find partners that will occupy those spaces as soon as possible. Otherwise, the developer has to guarantee the project, but again, the developer has all of this play in terms of the number of units. So the other thing too is that when it now I'm talking now when develops developers do good work in terms of providing the amenities and providing the good materials providing good design. They get to be much more favored by the city than developers that don't do work as well. You see, so there's the incentive, there's the incentive, almost like a competition among housing, affordable housing developers to give the best that they can because they're favored by the city when they come back and say, we really liked your projects, you know, I mean, and if there's another RFP, there's a possibility that you're going to get that RFP, or at least you stand a good chance. But if your project is not done well, then you get sort of, you know, scrutinized and somewhat look down upon. So there's the incentive is there one because the city is assisting in helping to do the construction and also that the there's there's a need to continue this relationship. So it's on multiple levels. And of course the architect also wants to always do a good job in making sure that the materials are done. And finally, you want to create a building that costs very little to maintain down the line, but is sturdy enough to be sustainable over time. Yes. Just push a little bit on that. I think I agree that, at least in my perspective, New York City has some amazing designs of new affordable housing, and many of them are yours. But when I looked at and I'm not an architect but when I looked at your projects they really jumped out to me for the quality of amenities, or a shared spaces or open spaces that are available and I don't see that in a lot of affordable housing projects in the city and certainly beyond. So, well one solution is to make the RFP process better by planners in some ways, like me. The, I also wonder what you what your advice would be to young architects and designers I've seen so many of the students in the four three really try hard to put ambitious and interesting ideas about amenities. Extra things into the units and buildings and surrounding spaces. I've also seen a lot of really misguided attempts at well intentioned but things that I know often fail or have seen in housing policy practice. So how did you learn that how do you incorporate that in your design process I guess, how are, why are your projects good and how did they get that way and how can you tell the students to get better from the, to not put all the onus on us planner. Yeah, that's, I think it's a great question. I think the, you know, it's all about sales, right, you have to sell your ideas, you know, you as architects, as you, you know, learning to, as you're rising as architects, you're essentially learning how to sell your ideas. And sometimes it's best to sell it to stakeholders by showing them what they're going to benefit from it. Okay. Well, how, how are you going to benefit from using stone countertops in an affordable housing project. I have an issue where we use we use literally stone countertops. And the way we do it is that look, if I put a mica for mica countertops or plastic laminate countertops, right in kitchens, they're going to last maybe one or two cycles maximum of residents that live there. You know, five years, 10 years, they start to peel off the developers come back and tear the whole thing apart and start again. Whereas if we use stone countertops, they could last a generation, if you if you take care of it properly. So in other words, we're saying look, look at this. Look at this, this is what your benefit is. Okay, I've made this example several times about using one huge hydronic boiler system as opposed to using VRS right where I'm saying that it cost the same to build the same number of VRS right the same number of HVAC systems for 100 units. As it would, if you were to buy a big boiler. But when you compare the two, if the boiler were to go down, if we were to we was to stop working, you'd have to go out and rent a huge boiler outside the building to keep the heat in the building. Whereas if one unit out of the hundred should break down, all you have to do is fix that one. So you're constantly figuring out ways to show them, you know, that this is a better and much more sustainable, and it's going to be much more cost effective. Then the final thing is, it's about negotiation as well. You know, what we do I when I mean by negotiation. I'm also talking about negotiating the deployment of cost on materials in the building. Okay, so what we try to do is that the things that people touch people see people experience people smell people taste in our buildings, we try to make them as sustainable as possible, and as nice as possible. And things that people don't see things that people don't get to to to touch, we tend to make them effective. But we save on cost there as much as we could possibly so we we spend more on finishes than on the infrastructure. But I'm not saying that the infrastructure is not as important. I'll give you an example. With our home street project, what we did was that we decided rather than the typical way of building a lot of this meteorized 14 story buildings is block and plan prefabricated block, right, a prefabricated plank the plank is the plank what I mean is a concrete flooring, right, is built in a factory ship to the side, hoisted up and then dropped on the block, then it's then built up, you know, on floor after floor so block and plan. That's the typical way of building. In certain cases, people go with concrete port in place cast in place concrete or some people go with steel. So what we do is we weigh the cost very early on in the design process, and we find the fastest and the most cost effective system. With home street in particular, we decided to go with prefabricated panels for the facade. So the facades were built in a factory. The plank was also built in a factory. It was both things were brought to the site and erected one at a time in a week. So we literally built each floor in a week. So we saved maybe six months of time on just interest that would have been put into if the project was a block and plank building, or if it was a casting place building. So we're saving on the cost of the infrastructure, which, again, that's stuff that you don't see it's there servicing the building, and then we applied the savings in interest on the facades of the building on the windows on the breeze so lays and you know the sun shading devices on the finishes, we even saved much more on the rear of the building where we went to insulated panels, which were again prefabricated, as opposed to the front of the building which was done in bricks, which was so the processes were slower. The front was slower than the back, but the cost of the back was much more, it was less than the front. So, again, you learn over time to deploy materials in a way that benefits the building at the end. It benefits what you look at, what you feel and what you use. So it's a sales process, like I said, you've got to give people the incentive to want to go along with you. Well, thank you very much for your time Victor. It was a fantastic talk, I think both architects and non-architects learned a lot and were very encouraged by your experience and your comments on the different stages of how to build affordable housing. I encourage everyone to look at the projects that Victor has made and is currently making because I think they contain very inspiring elements that we can keep learning from. And we hope to see you all next Friday for next conversation. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much for having me. This is fun, a lot of fun. And good luck with your housing lab. And again, I'm here for you. Thank you, thanks. Of course. Thank you so much.