The Knight Foundation has just announced $1 million in support to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a multi-year, multi-city, and applied research effort that they are calling the Future of the American City. The program will start in Miami and Miami Beach, but the plan is to expand to Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
As part of this initiative, the GSD will embed faculty and urban researchers into the local community, as well as organize three design studios that will build on each other every year. In the case of Miami and Miami Beach, the 3 themes that will be explored are urban mobility, affordability, and climate change. As you know, these two cities are center ice for the problem of sea level rise.
This sounds very similar to a design studio that I took at Penn, which was centered around water and housing issues in Bangladesh. It was a multi-year research studio (5 years in this case) and we visited and got paired up with locals in Dhaka during the course of the studio. I think these types of programs are a great way to ground the research in reality.
And as a fan of Miami and Miami Beach, I am curious to see what the teams come up with over the next 3 years.
Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash
The video below is a good follow-up to my recent post about the 100 million city and the rapid population growth that we are seeing in some parts of the developing world.
If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvM7jFZGAec?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
It’s a video about what is allegedly the “first permitted, 3D-printed home in America” – an 800 square foot home that was built/printed in Austin during SXSW in about 24 hours.
The project is a partnership between New Story (a non-profit) and ICON (a construction technologies company), and the goal is to pioneer a fast and cheap housing model for the developing world.
The cost for the above home is said to be about $4,000.
I was out for drinks recently with a friend of mine who is a developer in California and she mentioned a few things to me that I thought were really interesting.
First, she talked about how virtually nothing gets built in the Bay Area “as of right.” And so the market is hugely supply constrained. She said, you’re lucky if you can get your entitlements in 2 years. It’s starting to take longer. I immediately said: “That’s Toronto.”
Second, we talked about Proposition 13, which was timely given this recent post. One of the consequences of Prop 13, beyond helping golf clubs survive, is that longtime homeowners seem to be highly incentivized not to move.
Their property taxes are so below market that it can be more cost effective for them to stay put as opposed to downsize – even if they have too much house. This means far less turnover in the housing market.
Third, there really does seem to be a feeling in the Bay Area that it’s at a breaking point in terms of affordability. When a successful software engineer making $200,000 a year can’t afford housing, people naturally start to look to other cities.
We hear this refrain all the time in the media, but because I’m not active in that market, it was far more impactful hearing it from a friend.