ARCHITECTURE

Court ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community
Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project states
that certain policy decisions, even if unintentional, create
a “disparate impact” on discrimination in housing, and are
therefore illegal under the Fair Housing Act. 12
Historically, rather than being perceived as furthering
social equality, the minimum standards written
into zoning and building codes in the postwar period were
often equated with a type of top-down standardization that
stifled individual expression and choice. “Diversity” of design,
use, and economic standing became the overarching
goal, at least for cities, as advanced by Jane Jacobs and other
critics, and was pitted against enforced “sameness.” 13 A
generally positively construed diversity remains a key term
in housing policy debates today, with its relationship to
economic and social inequality unresolved. That is: diversity
is advanced in lieu of any substantive dialogue about
inequality or affordability. A case in point is the “Making
Room” initiative, launched in 2009 by the Citizens’ Housing
and Planning Council (CHPC). Its goal is to reform
regulations in New York City today in order to enable the
production of housing that would better match the reality
of how today’s households live. CHPC is focused in particular
on those regulations tied to normative definitions
such as “family” which limit the production of both housing
for single adults or nontraditional larger households;
they point to the fact that two parents and their children
constitute only 17 percent of New York City’s households.
Another of CHPC’s targets are regulations that prohibit a
combination of commercial and residential uses, despite a
rise in people working from home. As realistically minded
as these efforts are, it is important to note that such initiatives
tread precisely on the standards that have their
origins in leveling the playing field of real estate development,
advancing quality, and protecting those with little or
no power to survive in the open market. 14 1.3.3 Mixed Results
New forms of spatial organization linked to
codes, regulations, and design guidelines, have often been
linked to new models of real estate development. The
housing built by the federal Public Works Administration
(PWA)—a pilot program whose projects led to the institutionalization
of public housing in 1937—was intrinsically
connected to the modern housing movement inspired by
European housing models. The Labor Housing Conference
linked its advocacy for a non-commercial, non market–based
housing program to forms of collective living
that would follow a new, nontraditional aesthetic and provide
amenities including swimming pools and other communal
facilities [See HH: 1934]. 15 Sixty years later, with the
redevelopment of public housing through HOPE VI, the
strategy of linking advocacy for a new form of housing—
mixed-income and market-based—to a specific planning
and design idea, has not been any different. The urban
design and architectural paradigm articulated by the Congress
of the New Urbanism was linked to the Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s initiative to
promote a real-estate model that minimized, on the surface,
direct public involvement in housing, and instead
prioritized private financing, ownership, and management
of mixed-income housing. 16
The program was implemented differently in
different cities. By 2013, HOPE VI had distributed 262
revitalization grants and 285 demolition-only grants
throughout the country for an approximate total of $6.7
billion [See HH: 1994]. 17 Chicago, the city with one of the
most iconic collections of high-rise developments, was one
of the cities to embrace HOPE VI most emphatically [See
HH: 1947]. The city’s “Plan for Transformation,” launched
in 2000, targeted a unit mix consisting of one-third public
housing, one-third affordable housing, and one-third market-rate
housing in new construction [See HH: 1954, 1962]. 18
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