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Living in New York has become increasingly unaffordable for a majority of New Yorkers. Rising rents, displacement, and gentrification are all familiar to many of those who have been residing in the city for years, if not decades, disproportionately impacting low-income neighborhoods, minorities, the elderly and differently-abled. Because of these factors, people from these communities in particular have struggled to be able to continue living and working in New York.
The administration of Mayor DeBlasio is addressing this problem by preserving and creating 300,000 affordable units by 2026. An optimistic time frame for building--from Schematic Design to Certificate of Occupancy--a multifamily small-scale building is estimated at 18 to 24 months. Nevertheless, certain steps need to be taken to reduce time wherever possible in the design-to-build chain. With over 1,000 or so vacant lots throughout the five boroughs, New York City has the unique opportunity to develop and provide affordable homes for a population that is generally the first to be priced out. Infilling these small, irregular lots provides a means of patching both the social and urban fabric.
Currently, we need to merge repetitive design and construction in an expedited way. At the same time, building affordable housing with space at a premium, often results in the neglect of green space. Given these parameters, our proposal intends to solve both problems with one solution. We have created a digital app that will facilitate the design of replicable housing along with creating access to more green space throughout the building as an underlying concept.