bpchesney.org

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.

Continuing education is a great way of proliferating green building practices and that’s the goal of the Whole Building Design Guide. They offer online courses and accreditation — in particular, they have a class on Defining, Evaluating and Selecting Green Products for green building programs (including LEED) that looks interesting. I think they focus mainly on US federal buildings, but they may have some approaches, particularly with project management, that may be generally useful.

The Center for Democracy and Technology has been releasing Congressional Research Reports on theopencrs.com.  Just last week, they released a great primer on green building by Eric Fischer called, Issues in Green Building and Federal Response: an Introduction.  In it, he cites some staggering numbers on the environmental impact of building: