{"id":23,"date":"2011-06-19T21:24:03","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T21:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/interculturalurbanism.wordpress.com\/?p=23"},"modified":"2011-06-19T21:24:03","modified_gmt":"2011-06-19T21:24:03","slug":"housing-colorados-homeless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"Housing Colorado’s Homeless"},"content":{"rendered":"

(The following appeared in The Boulder Daily Camera<\/a><\/em>, co-authored with Kyle Cascioli, February 27, 2011).<\/p>\n

Governor John Hickenlooper has long been an advocate for Colorado\u2019s homeless.\u00a0 As mayor of Denver Hickenlooper\u2019s 2010 budget increased the amount that the city spent to support programs for the homeless.\u00a0 Last January the US Department of Housing and Urban Development chipped in, awarding $18.6 million to Colorado homeless-assistance programs in order to keep them functioning in 2011.\u00a0 \u00a0HUD\u2019s regional administrator Rick Garcia has pledged that two-thirds of the money will be used for transitional and permanent housing, with the balance being applied to the purchase of a new homeless management software system and homeless services.<\/p>\n

Homelessness is a complex social problem that has many causes.\u00a0 Increasing \u00a0gentrification of American neighborhoods, decreasing availability of low-income housing, deterioration of the social and economic safety nets that keep people from falling into homelessness, and routine political disenfranchisement of the social groups from which the homeless are generally drawn all contribute to the problem.\u00a0 Effective efforts to cope with homelessness often combine subsidized housing with a variety of case management services.\u00a0 While lots of attention has been paid to the kind and quality of services made available to the homeless (e.g., assistance in finding jobs, provision of child care, etc.) much less attention has been paid to the kind and quality of the buildings that house the homeless.<\/p>\n

One city that is ahead of the curve in addressing homelessness from a \u201cbuilt environment\u201d perspective is Los Angeles.\u00a0 In recent years LA\u2019s Skid Row Housing Trust commissioned a couple of new apartment buildings from the American architect Michael Maltzan<\/a> that serve not only the homeless person\u2019s need for shelter and basic services but also their psychological need for community and security\u2014both key elements that can assist recovery and a return to self-sufficiency.\u00a0\u00a0 History has clearly taught that such needs were not fulfilled by the infamous \u201curban renewal\u201d housing projects of the 1960s.\u00a0\u00a0 These generic, ruthlessly vertical projects\u2014drawn up and somewhat deceptively marketed as \u201cTowers in the Park\u201d\u2014tended to produce soulless, dehumanizing, and ultimately dangerous spaces against which residents understandably rebelled (think Pruitt-Igoe<\/a> in St. Louis, or Cabrini Green<\/a> in Chicago).<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles experiment is quite different and signals a new way of thinking about the urban built environment and the people who occupy it.\u00a0 Maltzan\u2019s Carver Apartments<\/a>, for<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Carver Apartments<\/p><\/div>\n

example, serves the homeless person\u2019s need for community and security by encasing a grand staircase, central courtyard, and overhead view of California sky within a curved, scalloped, and narrow-windowed exterior that simultaneously engages with its local context while presenting a bit of a defensive air.\u00a0 In one inspired tweak of design the building\u2019s third floor community room and laundry\u2014conceived as the domestic heart of the project\u2014allows, through a long horizontal window, for direct and prolonged eye contact between residents and drivers on the adjacent Santa Monica Freeway.\u00a0 These features have the effect of allowing the building\u2019s occupants, in Maltzan\u2019s words, \u201cto not only begin to reconnect with each other, but to the larger city beyond.\u201d While some might think the building’s design is extravagant for its intended use, isn\u2019t it worth the cost if it allows residents to make a more successful transition from homelessness to self-sufficiency?\u00a0 Plus, why should affordable housing be boring?\u00a0 And why shouldn\u2019t it both impact, and possibly improve, the surrounding neighborhood?<\/p>\n

With the American economy continuing to struggle and foreclosures at an all-time high it is likely that the number of homeless people in Colorado, as elsewhere, will continue to rise. \u00a0Before building new homeless shelters in the state it would behoove Governor Hickenlooper and Mr. Garcia to think about how buildings themselves can serve as weapons in the war against homelessness.\u00a0 They would be well-advised to explore how the ethos driving building design in other places might be re-interpreted and translated for a uniquely Colorado context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The following appeared in The Boulder Daily Camera, co-authored with Kyle Cascioli, February 27, 2011). Governor John Hickenlooper has long been an advocate for Colorado\u2019s homeless.\u00a0 As mayor of Denver Hickenlooper\u2019s 2010 budget increased the amount that the city spent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-eds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}