Gang and Lindsay’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times, offers a glimpse into what might become more common place in suburbia’s ever growing more diverse and immigrant filled communities. Often single family houses present a mismatch between cost and needed size over lifetime of family as it changes. They suggest instead of insisting this mismatch a purely financial situation, a urban design and planning opportunity exists as well.
Here we introduce the hundreds, and in come communities, thousands of vacant properties and buildings where “a wealth of steel, masonry and concrete” lay waiting for reuse and re-purpose for more adaptive and response housing that, might not only offer more resilient mixed use properties, but also multigenerational housing that would allow housing to grow and shrink has a family’s needs change. To make this new slant on old urban and design ideas more interesting, Gang and Lindsay discuss the possibility of using Phytoremediation where plants are used to treat and mitigate environmental problems common in many Rustbelt or Legacy Cities with links to America’s industrial past.
Read the full article at: Designing a Fix for Housing