UrbDeZine

Urban Design + Development + Economics + Community

WCAG 2.0 (Level AA)

HUD

San Diego in National Spotlight: City’s Failure to Prohibit Section 8 Discrimination Hurts Homeless Veterans

In the recent American Bar Association Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law, National Housing Law Project’s Supervising Attorney Deborah Thrope addresses key barriers to housing choice and mobility and provides policy recommendations to HUD that would help deconcentrate voucher families outside of high poverty areas. 

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homeless man on bench
Photo by Ed Yourdon – Homeless and Cold, Flickr Creative Commons

Achieving Housing Choice and Mobility in the Voucher Program: Recommendations for the Administration is in the latest edition of the American Bar Association Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law (Vol. 27-1).

The article recognizes the Housing Choice Voucher Program as vital to helping homeless individuals and low-income families’ overcome barriers to housing stability, and a powerful tool to deconcentrate poverty and decrease racial segregation in our nation’s communities.  While acknowledging the program’s potential to improve individual lives, families, and communities, the article discusses the program’s failure to meet its housing and community goals:Continue Reading San Diego in National Spotlight: City’s Failure to Prohibit Section 8 Discrimination Hurts Homeless Veterans

What San Diego is Doing Wrong: Housing Law 101

Instead of taking concrete steps to address the growing housing affordability crisis, San Diego has done nothing for years.  Now, faced with nationwide criticism for its mishandling of a Hepatitis A outbreak that was caused by the mistreatment of a growing homeless population, City leaders are wondering what went wrong.  

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mother and child
Photo by HaRRiS NasutioN

First, San Diego gave its public housing authority, San Diego Housing Commission, free reign to opt out of following federal laws aimed at protecting housing subsidy recipients.  As a result, San Diego Housing Commission has and continues to create policies that adversely impact the low-income tenants for whom it receives federal funding to protect. One example – SDHC’s Community Choices program encourages low-income families to spend 50% of their income on rent.Continue Reading What San Diego is Doing Wrong: Housing Law 101

Urban Street Symbols: Hidden Messages in the Metropolis

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Emily Read and Chen Hsu Homeless City Guide 2007
Emily Read and Chen Hsu, Homeless City Guide, 2007 – Re-published by permission of http://thepavement.org.uk

Who are the homeless of San Diego? Yearly reports from several agencies reveal tragic glimpses of the humans everyone labels home-less. Homelessness has existed since the beginning of History, so I used to be just as jaded and callous as other people who always assumed the lot would always consist of the stereotypes: criminal offenders, the mentally ill, the infirm, addicts and other varieties of outcasts. Continue Reading Urban Street Symbols: Hidden Messages in the Metropolis

$1 billion of federal funding to weave resilience into disaster preparedness

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67 U.S communities will compete for funding to implement plans for “recovery, resilience, and revitalization” better than this floodwall at New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. Photo by the author.

Last week’s announcement by the White House of $1 billion of funding to go to communities hit by disasters signals that ‘resilience’ – still just a buzzword to some – is increasingly becoming a concept that more businesses, communities, and governments are willing to put more money behind.Continue Reading $1 billion of federal funding to weave resilience into disaster preparedness

Towers in the Park—Unsafe at Any Income?

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Frederick Douglass House
Frederick Douglass Houses on the Upper West Side were built in 1958 and consists of 17 buildings of various heights and contains 2,056 apartments. The complex is still a public housing project run by the New York City Housing Authority. (Photo, Carol Berens 2013)

The month of June saw the opening of a major exhibition on the works of Le Corbusier at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the signing of a contract for a $2.2 million apartment in Lincoln Towers, about 20 blocks north of the museum. What, you may ask, do these events have to do with each other? Continue Reading Towers in the Park—Unsafe at Any Income?

Movie Review–The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

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Pruitt-Igoe demolitionThe recently-released documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, although specifically about a singular St. Louis, Missouri, project, spurs discussion about housing, public policy and modernism. Completed in 1954, this massive 33-building project designed by Minoru Yamasaki is perhaps most famous for its demise—Continue Reading Movie Review–The Pruitt-Igoe Myth