GSD Course Bulletin - Fall 2011
This term's information was last refreshed on 12 MAY 2015 14:52:56.
Courses taught by Michael Bell
05336 [M2]: Canceled - New Spaces of Housing (SES 0533600)
Urban Planning and Design
Seminar - 2 credits - Limited enrollment
This course is a module. It lasts the second half of the semester only.
The Rise of an Anti - Policy in Housing and its effects on Design and Cost of HousingThis seminar will explore the decreased role direct federal expenditures play in lower-income and public housing development in the United States since the advent in the 1980's of low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC) and other tax based incentives for housing development. The research topics will address how changes in funding mechanisms have affected not only the development and design of lower-income and public housing, but also how they these changes in means have been perceived and what impact they had on the engagement of planning and architecture practices with issues of poverty and low-income housing. With a focus on parallel evolutions in architectural design and theory since the 1980's that has often seemed to abandon housing as a zone of experimentation the seminar will explore how planning and architectural education could do far more to produce a counter to the status quo in all forms of housing production. The goal is re-connect Architecture and Planning capabilities within a discussion of the financial practices as well the political philosophies of these shifts - more accurately within the seeming loss of an ability to critically discuss equity issues that many of the tax incentive practices often seem to dissimulate into market development models. Affordable housing as a derivative of tax credits, multi-tiered funding sources, and an architectural guise of "fitting in" with the quasi-vernacular of broader status quo developer housing models (and its constituency) has increasingly made it difficult to discuss the deeper meaning of both the political underpinnings of these policy shifts but also the potential of architectural and planning practices to affect the outcome - to enter the debate.U.S. housing policy increasingly moved toward less reliance on direct subsidy of low-income and poverty rental housing during the 1990's, but the actual means to achieve this shift were created in the 1980's with the emergence of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and other incentive means offered in lieu of direct government subsidy for housing. In 1998 the Quality Work and Housing Responsibility Act (QWHRA) employed directly spatial language in seeking to "de-concentrate" poverty in Public Housing Authority Developments where the homogeneity of constituencies and certain risk factors was deemed too high. These financial and overtly spatial mechanisms - moving monies and bodies - require far more attention then they have had in the public realm, but also within the architectural and planning academic and design realms. Research Requirements:Each seminar member will be expected to make an in class presentation as well as write a final paper that analyzes the broad implications of housing policy changes enacted during the Clinton Administration as well as the origin the LIHTC programs. The seminar will address more specific aspects of how programs such as HOPE VI or The Quality Work and Housing Responsibility Act affected housing design but you will be asked to add both specificity and interpretation to how changes in the relationships between policy, finance and design affected the role planners and architects play in housing design. This is a research seminar where the professor is presenting works in progress towards a book.