I just came from the opening conversation for the Housing Cities 2009 symposium. It was a discussion primarily by Sandra Henriquez, the head of the Boston Housing Authority, prompted by Lawrence Vale, a professor at MIT. The salient points seemed to be these:
- Make public housing look like multi-family housing
- Maintain compliance to the same set of standards and eliminate the bureaucracy associated with publicly-funded housing
- Add the ability to finance/leverage public housing to make improvements
- Learn property management principles from private management
- Blend publicly-subsidized and unsubsidized housing in the same development
- Higher income renters set a standard for the quality and care of the site
- Helps encourage low income tenants to pay their rent on time because they feel like the neighborhood will improve with the influx of unsubsidized renters
- Decouple social services and property management
- Sends a mixed message when the property management has to both run a business and act as a social worker
- Decoupling allows the property to be managed as any other real estate asset which can make upgrades
- Green building
- Photovoltaic panels have been installed on the roof of a HOPE VI project, Maverick Gardens, near the Maverick T stop. It is one, if not the, first public housing project to be LEED certified.
- Ms. Henriquez’s dream state
- High density, high physical profile affordable housing that blends into its surroundings through a connection to less affordable, lower housing. There would be a scale of height and affordability, all under the same housing development — this is based on a model in Vancouver. This would help the neighborhood integrate seamlessly together.
(But who are the middle class folks who will act as the bridge and what’s their incentive?)
It was a very interesting conversation and Ms. Henriquez did an admirable job of providing a background in the challenges facing federally-funded housing today.
