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Originally Posted by chris08876
If I may play devils advocate here... wouldn't we need public housing (projects) like in the pic of St. Louis to one, keep units affordable to the masses, and two, provide the sheer numbers of units required to keep the demand at bay or even create a surplus.
As the population grows, like many other large cities, we may have to follow suit and build such housing. Granted the design is always at the mercy of how much budget there is, but housing like that might be needed as the U.S. grows to 350 million ... to 400 ... to 450 and beyond.
I could see certain urban cores or city limits becoming so expensive, that we might see the tower in the park concept sprout over in the burbs. Not the city, but the suburbs.
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We see a tall public housing building and think density, but the total number of units per acre may be less dense than a 2 or 3-story neighborhood of town homes. The tower in the park is an highly inefficient land-use model and it frustrates me that some communities still deploy it, especially for public housing.
My personal opinion is that mixed-income communities are most desirable. Having a single public housing complex with no market rate units can create a concentrations of poverty, disinvestment, and other society ills. We need to get away from that and look at 50/50 housing mixes. Fifty percent of the units being market rate and the other half being affordable. The Galveston example I posted earlier is one should method. I did a little work in a southern state years back where I insisted on the 50/50 concept as a condition of financing. It drove our accounts crazy, but I could not be prouder of the final product: a viable, well-maintained mixed-income community.
The Toronto region is a great example of suburban areas building dense towers. There's nothing inherently wrong with that as it's usually market rate condos that in turn are rented out if not owner-occupied. The end result is a mixed tenure high density community. It's not just the public housing projects deviating from the built form of the larger community.
Here is a neat little presentation on density and its various forms:
https://static1.squarespace.com/stat...ity-Screen.pdf
I found a neat quote in the presentation that speaks exactly to what I'm getting at. " Height, density and massing of new buildings respects and reinforces the existing character." The same should be true for any new subsidized affordable housing or major redesign of public housing.
On the latter issue of rehab and redesign, I'm miffed at how affordable housing residents in NYC can protest the loss of parking lots and underutilized space for infill development, especially when proceeds of said development would go to much needed housing repair and maintenance.