the story of NORCS

Great research on elderly communities of New York City by Interboro.

Emergency Aid

photo by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

And so come the reports of the aftermath of the Earthquake that hit the capital city of Haiti. It was of no surprise that much aid was needed, that money was being asked for and that organization was to say the least, unorganized. Its the nature of events such as these, that we can imagine, yet still feel unprepared in its real aftermath. From the Tsunami to Katrina, we just never have enough in preparation for such events.

And why does it come to this? It could be easy to say that these communities are already under pressure and the slightest imbalance can cause deeper unrest. But if we get to the heart of the issue, are the cities, the built environment, the dwellings and infrastructure ill prepared for resiliency in such events? Can we plan for unplanned events?

Our cities are not built sustainably. Density, materials and technologies are not capable to respond to big events that mother nature can unleash. But what has been reported are the numbers of "unorganized" decisions coming out of the events that are worth noting. I will also list other organizations and types of thinking that help to plan the un-planable.

Housing:
Transitional Structures
architecture for humanity

Organizational:
Wise Earth Network

additional links:
A Plan to Spur Growth Away From Haiti’s Capital

Shrinking City

Article: New York Times by David Streitfeld

"a model for a different era". From expansion with development to developing with shrinkage. Flint, Michigan talk about using land banks to covert abandoned, foreclosed properties into natural landscape, saving money, condesing the town and ultimately rethinking the American city.

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

land banks: (taken from this U. of Michigan site by Jessica de Wit) A land bank is a public authority created to efficiently hold, manage and develop tax-foreclosed property.(1) Land banks act as a legal and financial mechanism to transform vacant, abandoned and tax-foreclosed property back to productive use. Generally, land banks are funded by local governments' budgets or the management and disposition of tax-foreclosed property.(2) In addition, a land bank is a powerful locational incentive, which encourages redevelopment in older communities that generally have little available land and neighborhoods that have been blighted by an out-migration of residents and businesses.(3) While a land bank provides short-term fiscal benefits, it can also act as a tool for planning long-term community development. Successful land bank programs revitalize blighted neighborhoods and direct reinvestment back into these neighborhoods to support their long-term community vision.

Related:
Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program, University of California, Berkeley

USA Today Article

Building a Process

Related Article

Basically: Non-profit invests in foreclosed real estate, employs own clients to renovate and live, while profiting and empowering more clients in new process of housing those in need.

"Pikes Peak Behavioral Health ...

The nonprofit group, a mental health counseling center with a growing number of military veteran clients and patients, wants to buy a half-built foreclosed apartment project near the Fort Carson Army base. Using military veterans to complete the construction project, the group would sell the buildings and use the proceeds to buy another property, and repeat the process.

The group also wants to hire veterans as “peer navigators” in a buddy system to guide wounded and troubled veterans into civilian life, helping them with things like job applications and the fine print at the department of motor vehicles..."

Shanty Towns

image: Jim Wilson and related article: Cities Deal With Surge in Shantytowns by Jesse McKinley

"Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns."

"Dozens of homeless men and women here have found more organized shelter at the Village of Hope, a collection of 8-by-10-foot storage sheds built by the nonprofit group Poverello House and overseen by Mr. Stack. Planted in a former junkyard behind a chain-link fence, each unit contains two cots, sleeping bags and a solar-powered light."

Municipal Financing

image: Solar Panels 365

Affording solar panels for the typical American home can cost nearly 50,000$. The money to get those panels usually is covered by some home improvement loan...putting the home owner at risk if they decide to move...usually leaving the panels with the house, while hanging onto the loan.

Municipal Financing sees the implementation of solar panels in a community as a more infrastructural issue: ICC explains:

"Under municipal financing of solar power systems, initial solar power investments are covered by a loan from the city, which is secured by property taxes and paid back over time, generally with interest. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is two-fold. First, any homeowner is eligible (not just those with good credit), and second, the loan repayment obligation attaches to the house, not the individual. This means that if a homeowner invests in a solar power system and then moves, they are no longer covering the cost of the upgrade, but instead the loan repayment obligation passes to any future buyers."

Californians already have this option for increasing their local production of energy...with cities in states such as Texas, Colorado and Virginia tagging along.

Novel idea....treating energy production as real estate...and being financed by the city, it becomes a community investment...as energy that isn't consumed by the individual homes is fed back into the grid...

sources:
Institute for Southern Studies
NYTIMES: Harnessing the Sun, With Help From Cities

other energy sources:
wind: Staten Island Harnessing the Wind

American Foreclosures

Excerpts taken from article: All Boarded Up by ALEX KOTLOWITZ

"...And in December, just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000..."

"...When Jimenez arrived in Cleveland, he learned that the house had been vacant for two years; scavengers had torn apart the walls to get the copper piping, ripped the sinks from the walls and removed the boiler from the basement..."

"...When they lost the house to foreclosure, they left nothing for the scavengers. They stripped their own dwelling, piling toilets, metal screen doors, kitchen cabinets, the furnace and copper pipes into a moving van. “They said, ‘Why should someone else get it?’ ” Gardner told me. “So they took it themselves.” In December, Gardner’s neighbor watched a man strain to push a cart filled with thin slabs of concrete down the street. It explained why so many of the abandoned homes in the city are without front steps, as if their legs had been knocked out from under them. Perhaps such pillage is part of the natural momentum of a city being torn apart. If you can’t hold onto something of real value, at least get your hands on something..."

"...Already places as diverse as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas and Minneapolis have neighborhoods where at least one of every five homes stands vacant..."

“Cleveland is a bellwether,” Immergluck says. “It’s where other cities are heading because of the economic downturn.”

"...The first question outsiders now ask is, Where has everyone gone? The homeless numbers have not increased much over the past couple of years, and it appears that most of the people who lost their homes have moved in with relatives, found a rental or moved out of the city altogether. The county has lost nearly 100,000 people over the past seven years, the largest exodus in recent memory outside of New Orleans..."

"...The legislation was labeled the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, but Cleveland and a handful of other cities had to lobby hard to convince Congress that “stabilization” in their cities meant tearing down houses — not renovating them. Last month, Cleveland said it planned to use more than half of its $25.5 million allotment to raze 1,700 houses. This presents an opportunity to reimagine the city, to erase the obsolete and provide a space for the new. (There’s little money now to build, so imagine is the operative word.) ..."

Sandbag housing

MMA Architects and new housing strategies using sand filled bags, stacked...
related articles:
Treehugger
Dezeen