Areas of Practice 6: Housing Flashcards
Economic Development
Supports the economy of a community, region, state or nation. This includes:
Job Creation Private Business Expansion Tax Base Expansion Wealth Creation Quality of Life Standard of Living
Multiplier Effect
Economic development works by using government inducements and assistance to increase private investment. This private investment is expected to create new jobs, reduce unemployment and increase incomes, thus increasing demand for goods and services. This then cycles back through driving further private investment. The concept is the multiplier effect that certain types of jobs then drive demand for other jobs.
Business-friendly environment
Businesses looking to locate in a community want to have available development sites and/or buildings, access to labor, access to financial capital, access to transportation and utilities, a high quality of life, and a supportive regulatory environment as examples.
Enterprise Zone
An area in which policies to encourage economic growth and development are in place. This could include tax incentives, infrastructure incentives and/or reduced regulations to attract investment. Enterprise zones are specified geographic areas.
Pillars of Economic Development
Community support
Ability to create partnership
Timing
Urban Design
Urban design is about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric. Urban design draws together the many strands of place-making, environmental stewardship, social equity and economic viability into the creation of places with distinct beauty and identity.
Urban design is derived from but transcends planning and transportation policy, architectural design, development economics, engineering and landscape. It draws these and other strands together creating a vision for an area and then deploying the resources and skills needed to bring the vision to life.
Context-Sensitive Design (CSD)
Refers to roadway standards and development practices that are flexible and sensitive to community values. The CSD allows design decisions to better balance economic, social and environmental objectives within the community. It promotes several key principles:
- Balance safety, community, and environmental goals in all projects;
- Involve the public and affected agencies early and continuously;
- Use an interdisciplinary team tailored to project needs;
- Apply flexibility inherent in design standards;
- Incorporate aesthetics as an integral part of good design.
Form-based code
A means of regulating development to achieve a specific urban form. Form-based codes create a predictable public realm by controlling physical form primarily through local government zoning regulations with a lesser focus on land use. Form-based codes address the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks.
Landscape Urbanism
A theory that argues that the best way to plan and organize a city is through the design of the city’s landscape. The theory argues that historically there has been too much focus on buildings and not enough focus on the surrounding landscape.
New Urbanism
At the neighborhood level, New Urbanism promotes mixed income, walkable neighborhoods with a variety of architectural styles. The neighborhood should be well-defined with an edge and a center. It should include public green spaces. People should be able to access shopping, work, and school within a five-minute walk, or at least be able to access transit within a five-minute walk.
The Congress for New Urbanism, which was founded by Peter Calthorpe, provides information about these principles.
Transit-oriented development (TOD)
A mixed-use development designed to maximize access to public transportation. This type of development typically has a light rail, bus, or other types of transit station located at the center.
Tactical Urbanism
Refers to low-cost temporary changes to the urban environment that are intended to demonstrate the potential impacts that change can have. For example, adding a temporary bicycle lane, street furniture, or turning empty storefronts into pop-up shops. Park-ing Day which turns parking spaces into temporary park spaces is one example of tactical urbanism.
Transect
A term that refers to development on a rural to urban continuum. This concept is used in New Urbanist planning practices.
The Transect integrates environmental methodology for habitat assessment with zoning methodology for community design. The professional boundary between the natural and man-made disappears, enabling environmentalists to assess the
design of the human habitat and the urbanists to support the viability of nature. This urban-to-rural transect hierarchy has appropriate building and street types for each area along the continuum.
Principles of New Urbanism
- Walkability
- Connectivity
- Mixed Use and Diversity
- Mixed Housing
- Quality Architecture and Urban Design
- Traditional Neighborhood Structure
- Increased Density
- Green Transportation
- Sustainability
- Quality of Life
First model tenement
1855, NYC.
First dumbbell tenement
1879, NYC
Tenement House Act of 1867.
NYC
Required new tenement buildings to provide a narrow air shaft between adjacent structures, windows that open into the shaft, two toilets on each floor, and a one square yard window in each room.
First major housing code in the United States.
How the Other Half Lives
1890, Jacob Riis
Highlighted the plight of the poor in NYC.
Tenement House Law
1901, New York State
Outlawed dumbbell tenements. The new housing code was vigorously enforced by the City. The City required inspection and permits for construction and alterations. It also required wide light and air areas between buildings and toilets and running water in each apartment unit.
Neighborhood Unit Concept
1920, Clarence Perry
Part of the New York Regional Plan. The Neighborhood Unit Concept defines a neighborhood based on a five minute walking radius. At the center is a school. Each neighborhood is approximately 160 acres.
Public Works Administration (PWA)
- The PWA provided 85 percent of the cost of public housing projects. This represented the first federally supported public housing program.
National Housing Act
1934, established the Federal Housing Administration with the purpose of insuring home mortgages.
