As neighborhoods across Boston face enormous development pressure, there is a risk that low-income residents will be forced out of the city. Social disruption due to gentrification, shifting government policies and programs, and the challenges of climate change make the future of affordable housing in Boston precarious.
Despite robust demand across the country for affordable starter homes and rental units, stringent land-use regulations, high construction costs, and an ongoing shortage of skilled laborers have made it difficult, if not impossible, to profitably produce middle-market housing. Innovative strategies to overcome these challenges will be the focus of this half-day symposium, which will feature the finalists from the inaugural Ivory Prize in Housing Affordability.
By the 1980s the Dudley Square neighborhood of Roxbury was facing significant challenges. Absentee landlords had allowed property to deteriorate, left units vacant, or had used arson to raze buildings and make insurance claims. Facing what many considered insurmountable obstacles, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative was formed to create a comprehensive plan for “development without displacement.”
Today, cities are no longer constrained by local time zones. For millions of people in the Philippines, the work day now happens at night, due to changing patterns of labor caused by globalization. What are the local implications of this nocturnalization of work?
Alloy Development is a real estate development company that has built residential buildings along the Highline, in Hudson Yards, and in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. Its website states: “Our belief in making great architecture guides our practice,” and adds “we have a responsibility to make the experience and quality of our work meaningful.”
In recent years, Buenos Aires has set out to become more inclusive and sustainable, and city government has made serving its most vulnerable populations a priority. To that end, the Housing Authority of the City of Buenos Aires has designed an innovative Socio-Urban Integration Plan which seeks to involve the relevant actors in the decision-making of the slum-upgrading intervention.
Within the context of the sharing economy, populations of today are increasingly mobile, urban, and less inclined to ownership.Collaborative consumption has molded expectations of sharing, and along comes a shifting demographic of urban and non-family householders. A new form of co-housing has emerged: co-living, that is a formalized version of room-sharing, straddles the hospitality and residential sectors.
The United States is an aging society where economic inequality is greater than in other aging societies. Age-associated disadvantages such as declining health overlap with social determinants of health that include structural inequalities experienced by some groups throughout life and into late life. As a result, there are vast differences in people’s experiences of later life.
In the 1960s and 1970s Boston struggled to stem urban flight and a landscape of deteriorating housing stock. Massive redevelopment projects, such as the razing of the West End, sent shockwaves through the city. By the mid-1960s, the South End found itself the focus of redevelopment plans. A group of mostly Puerto Rican residents began to meet and then incorporated as the Emergency Tenants’ Council, which became Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, Inc. (IBA).
