Housing
We recognize housing as a human right and aim to empower promising innovations and solutions that ensure everyone has a place to call home.
Housing is at the foundation of every great city. However, providing enough safe and affordable housing to meet population needs poses a challenge for cities worldwide.
Since 2018, New Housing Solutions has identified and responded to the need for new approaches, tools, and partnerships to address the many faces of the housing crisis. From local considerations such as zoning, regulation, and impacts of real estate investments to larger scale dynamics of systemic inequities and the increasing threat of climate change, cities’ unique experiences and responses to similar challenges call for multisectoral collaboration and dialogue.
This initiative is just one example of NewCities’ continuous efforts to gather experts and practitioners to exchange knowledge with the aim of promoting affordability, community cohesion, and healthy environments for all.
See featured resources, events, projects and editorial related to Housing.
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New Housing Solutions
Our housing initiative, “New Housing Solutions” is dedicated to understanding the challenges posed by the complex nature of urban housing across the world and exploring innovations in affordability, community, and health.
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NewCities’ Masterclass Series
Dive deeper into the latest urban issues with some of the world’s leading contemporary experts. This professional training program provides an insider’s guide to successful projects and policies shaping cities across the globe. It’s designed to inspire, educate, provoke debate, and offer both novel conceptual frameworks and practical tools for city-makers while addressing urban issues from a transdisciplinary and systemic lense.
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Action for Community Wellbeing: Developing Affordable Housing and Small Businesses
By Julie Rusk and Tara Barauskas A project destined to open later this year will bring new affordable housing together with neighborhood-owned small businesses to the heart of one of Santa Monica’s most vibrant and historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The City of Santa Monica is highly invested in advancing the wellbeing of its community and neighbors.…
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Black Housing in America – with Melvin Mitchell
Photo by Rachel Martin on Unsplash. The history of black housing in America is one of segregation, stigma, and wealth destruction, not creation. Architect Melvin Mitchell, CEO of Bryant Mitchell Architects, calls for a new black-owned and controlled corner of the housing industry, one capable of creating household wealth for black communities rather than funneling…
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Amplifying New Housing Solutions
Population growth, mass migration, climate change, a global pandemic, and a civil rights movement have pushed cities around the world to rethink how they can provide a more accessible, affordable, safe housing that fosters health, happiness, and community. NewCities’ first virtual event, New Housing Solutions LIVE, aimed to respond to the need for new tools,…
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An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable-Workforce Housing
The pressing need for affordable workforce housing continues to grow, unabated—fueled by escalating land and construction costs, restrictive zoning, and very low real wage growth. How can we build additional affordable-workforce housing in neighborhoods served by public transit options, and near job centers? How can we bring down the cost of housing, and simplify the…
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Public Housing Redevelopment Without Needing the Word “Gentrification”
The sour taste of urban renewal is still on the taste buds of residents who were displaced during the 1950s-1960s. Unfortunately, some elected officials and Public Housing Authority (PHA) board commissioners and staff are unaware of the history in these minority communities. The decades of disinvestment and underfunding in public housing have led to depreciated,…
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The Big Rethink – Housing
Room for ImprovementApril 21, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Global orders to “shelter in place” implies housing is indeed a fundamental human right, but even a cursory reading of housing policies suggests this is an aspirational goal, at best. The economic fallout of COVID-19 has pushed two unspoken truths about housing into the…