Raise the Hammer

A "Design-Centric" Approach to Community Building for Density Creation in our Downtown:

1) Urban renewal is probably the single policy most responsible for creating what has become the developed world's most entrenched permanent underclass, with concentrated poverty leading to neglible opportunities, broken families, drug abuse and crime....

More recent theories about how to provide affordable and low-income housing focus on designs which help to heal communities.

On it's Affordable Housing Design Advisor site (below), one can find ...links to model projects and possibilities, and other resources. It's not the cutting edge of affordability design. It is, however, a fine survey of contemporary thinking on how to build housing that matters for people without much money.
>>> www.worldchanging.com/archives/000034.html


2) "An affordable housing project can be resisted by the community every step of the way, or welcomed. It can be a problem that gets progressively worse, or an asset for its neighborhood for decades. It can be a constant source of discomfort and resentment for everyone who lives in and around it. Or it can provide the people who live there with everything we all expect from our home: comfort, security, an atmosphere to thrive and do our best in. ----More than anything else, the difference is design.----

The Affordable Housing Design Advisor brings together experience and ideas from successful affordable housing projects all over the country, and the people who developed, designed and built them."---

www.designadvisor.org/

-- "The conventional wisdom in the U.S. that high-density, high-rise affordable family housing is certain to have a negative effect on both residents and neighborhoods is not always correct.

Two developments that encourage this revision are located adjacent to one another at 201 Turk Street and 111 Jones Street in San Francisco. At 225 dwelling units per acre these two nine-story buildings have a very high density, yet they do not appear out of scale in the dense inner city Tenderloin District."

According to Arthur Evans, president of the company that entered a joint-venture with Chinese Community Housing to build 201 Turk, "People are amazed by this development. The federal housing administration sent their architects over to learn from it. The police and the neighbors say that this development has done more to reduce crime and raise property values than anything tried in the last ten years."--

--www.designadvisor.org/gallery/turk.html

www.designadvisor.org/tools/comparative_index.html
www.designadvisor.org/green/trolley_square.htm
www.designadvisor.org/green/Pantages.htm
www.designadvisor.org/green/waterfront.htm
www.designadvisor.org/green/gold_dust.htm
www.designadvisor.org/green/artists.htm

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It is a "swell" approach, worth a spin!

What the hell, it's a quite weekend, take it out for a drive! We really have nothing to loose - as we will always have our time-tested approach of kicking, jabbing, poking, sniggering, yawning, accusing, protesting sandbagging, and windbagging to fall back on come Monday ;-)

(More on demystifying Icons, later today.)