Archives

Bronx By Design: Why Beauty Matters

Great public buildings were once the centerpieces of their communities: they inspired, conferred a sense of dignity on the neighborhood and sent a message...

The Experience of Home

The voices and images in The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons vividly illustrate the importance of good, safe housing in supporting mental and physical...

The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons

The Guided Tours at Urban Horizons is part of my ongoing series of collaborative projects involving people in their personal spaces. This project with...

Public Dollars and Private Interests

Until the mid-1960s, Chicago’s West Madison skid row was home to mostly low-income single men and women living in over 2,800 units of often...

Planning for More than Housing

Barry Meister has heard the rumors, and denies them emphatically: He has no plans to relocate Steel Craft, the small factory he owns in...

The Betrayal of Mount Laurel

Ever since the state Supreme Court’s pioneering Mount Laurel decisions in 1975 and 1983, New Jersey has been seen as a leader across the...

More Than a Roof

It’s common for most people to make a distinction between “house” and “home.” One word defines a roof over one’s head, nothing more, nothing...

Shelter Shorts

One Of A Kind Jane Wood, longtime New York City tenant activist, died in March at the age of 96. Wood began fighting to help...

Power of (Ex)change

An organization dedicated to "youth empowerment" sends a proposal to a sympathetic funder. The proposal contains this sentence: "We seek nothing short of revolutionary...

Predatory Bender

Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance, by Matthew Lee. Inner City Press. 2004. 360 pp. $19.95 (paperback).www.atlasbooks.com or www.innercitypress.org/books.html. I have to...

Marshall E. Crawford, Jr.

Not many of us can say with any degree of certainty that we know what it is we were truly meant to do. We...