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Who's Next?

Who's Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities
Edited by Daniel Talesnik and Andres Lepik
ArchiTangle, November 2021

Hardcover | 10 x 12 inches | 272 pages (plus 16-page booklet) | 212 illustrations | English (also available in German) | ISBN: 9783966800174 | $68.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Homelessness—the state of having no home—is a growing global problem that requires local discussions and solutions. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it has noticeably become a collective concern. However, in recent years, the official political discourse in many countries around the world implies that poverty is a personal fault, and that if people experience homelessness, it is because they have not tried hard enough to secure shelter and livelihood.

Although architecture alone cannot solve the problem of homelessness, the question arises: What and which roles can it play? Or, to be more precise, how can architecture collaborate with other disciplines in developing ways to permanently house those who do not have a home? 

Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities seeks to explore and understand a reality that involves the expertise of national, regional, and city agencies, nongovernmental organizations, health-care fields, and academic disciplines. Through scholarly essays, interviews, analyses of architectural case studies, and research on the historical and current situation in Los Angeles, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, São Paulo, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo, this book unfolds different entry points toward understanding homelessness and some of the many related problems.

The book is a polyphonic attempt to break down this topic into as many parts as needed, so that the specificities and complexities of one of the most urgent crises of our time rise to the fore.

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Last last month came reports that Eric Adams, who started his first term as New York City mayor on January 1, would start the process of clearing homeless encampments. One month earlier Adams implemented a zero-tolerance policy removing homeless people sleeping in subway cars or in subway stations to homeless shelters or mental health hospitals. The tough positions respectively make the city appear to be free of unhoused people and make the subways feel safer as more people return to offices following two years of working from home. While the forceful tactics harken back to Adams's decades as a police captain, most of the critiques being levied at him concern the alternatives to homeless encampments and subway sleeping: Would they be moved to homeless shelters? (Most are choosing not to and will most likely rebuild their encampments.) Would a program of permanent housing address the clearances? (Adams hopes to move the unhoused into special "Safe Haven" sites that offer private rooms, but the pace of their construction, a continuation of Mayor Bill de Blasio's policies, is far too slow. As one Queens politician sensibly put it: "We need emergency and permanent housing solutions now. Every New Yorker deserves safe, dignified housing."
The recent NYC news putting homeless shelters and "safe, dignified housing" back in the spotlight raises questions about the role of architects and architecture in such a process. What can architects do? Given the need for housing (the city's homeless shelters are notoriously unsafe so the move toward private housing is preferred over creating more "beds" in more shelters), one answer is obvious: design buildings for formerly unhoused individuals and families. But when the city is unable to move forward in a timely fashion with such developments, the responsibility falls to non-profit developers, such as Common Ground (now Breaking Ground), whose "supportive housing has a full spectrum of wraparound supports that help people recover from the trauma of homelessness, achieve stability, and rebuild their lives in housing." Some of Breaking Ground's new construction is architecturally distinctive, with one of them — Alexander Gorlin Architects' now twelve-year-old The Brook — featured in the exhibition Who's Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities, which was on display at the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) from November 2021 to February 2022. Given the widespread crisis of homelessness, this is an exhibition that really should travel to other countries and continents; I'm not aware of any plans for it to do so, so the companion book is valuable for highlighting the architectural issues around homelessness and spotlighting some projects addressing the crisis.
Exhibition curator Daniel Talesnik is joined by Andres Lepik for editorial duties on the publication also titled Who's Next? It is basically a three-part book, with essays, geographical profiles, and projects. The first comes in the form of eight essays in four chapters: Housing Systems, Terminology, The Legality of Housing, and Land Value. These essays are illuminating, as they draw attention to aspects of homelessness that are unknown or just plain ignored. For example, Luisa Schneider's contribution, "Living and Living at the Limit," examines "spaces for intimacy" in Leipzig, Germany, that enable unhoused couples to "enjoy the privacy they seldomly find on the streets." David Madden's piece on defining "a different politics of homelessness" is accompanied by covers from StreetWise, the Chicago newspaper sold by the homeless that I remember from my years in the city decades ago:
The essays importantly offer various positions on homelessness, while the second part of the book, "Cities," presents data and further essays on more than a half-dozen cities, including Mumbai, Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York. The data is fairly consistent from city to city, allowing readers to compare the selected cities in terms of the unhoused population, the number of people living below the poverty level, the unemployment rate, and the average price of owning a house, among other stats. Returning to NYC, the data reveals that although the number of people living below the poverty line has decreased over the last twenty years, the number of homeless people in shelters every night has nearly tripled in that time — or nearly quadrupled based on HUD assumptions! The accompanying essay, by Aya Maceda and James Carse, discusses the interrelated crises of homeless and affordable housing, explaining how the city's "temporary" shelters are often occupied by some families for more than a year, and drawing attention to the number of affordable housing units being lost this century. They find a lasting precedent in last century's Mitchell-Lama program, which created 150,000 affordable units over two decades, focusing on Co-op City and Twin Parks in the Bronx (they were writing before the recent a fire in the latter killed 17 residents). As more affordable housing units are lost in New York, the specter of that many more homeless people on the streets and in shelters rises; or as the aptly titled exhibition/book asks, "who's next?"
The last section of the book, "The Importance of Design, or What Can Architecture Do?," presents nearly two-dozen built projects in Europe and the United States, most of them examples of supportive housing, with two exceptions: OMA's Seattle Public Library, an inclusive space that offers a number of programs (psychological counseling, medical help, job training, assistance in securing housing) targeted to homeless visitors; and a proposal (now built) for a mausoleum in Santiago, Chile, exclusively for people experiencing homelessness when they died. The architectural standouts are clearly the projects Michael Maltzan has designed for the Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles, including the Star Apartments on the cover. Although most of the other projects don't find architects applying form-making typically reserved for the rich to homeless populations, they offer lessons in other areas, such as adaptive reuse, prefab, and unit layouts. In regards to the last, consistent floor plans and sections that highlight individual units in each project are helpful additions to the usual photographs, texts, and project data. Rounding out the book's offerings are a lengthy bibliography (unfortunately, most sources are in German) and a 16-page stapled glossary with key terms defined in the context of the exhibition, from "address" and "welfare state." Architects interested in doing something about the people in their cities who don't have safe, dignified housing should have this book.

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