Our planning services focus on classifying and valuing the urban ecosystem for urban planning. In our place- and ecosystem-based planning, we discuss various ways through which investing in urban ecosystems can enhance resilience and quality of life in cities. We gather and analyze data, maintain evidence of existing services and community assets, and keep score over time. We identify analytical valuation challenges to inform urban planning decision-makers in the face of high heterogeneity and fragmentation characterizing urban ecosystems. We recognize the important role urban areas play in addressing social justice and climate change challenges.
Our architectural team’s priorities include design excellence, accelerating development, and cultivating more attractive economically and environmentally sustainable communities. We provide consultancy and technical assistance services to public-, private clients and municipalities on their efforts to deliver outstanding, unique, compact, diverse, mixed-use developments and housing that is affordable “for all” projects, advance renewable energy solutions, transforming cities, acquiring new technology, urban agriculture while creating jobs and value for families and businesses.
We should take this opportunity to address some of the longstanding inequities that Black and other communities of color continue to experience. Perhaps more than any other intervention, access to safe, stable, and affordable housing is recognized as vital to advancing equity and social justice—and now to help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Our approach to housing affordability focuses first on allowing market signals to work again in every neighborhood: the places we live must be able to change, evolve, and, yes, grow if they are successful places where more people want to be. A long-lasting recovery strategy should include transformative investment increasing people’s access to opportunities and harnessing growth to broadly share benefits.
We believe the antidote to the disruptive effects of ‘gentrification’ is to introduce a land tax to stabilize land prices, incentivizing investment, and increasing the gradual supply of housing that is affordable. The next increment of development—from single-family homes to small apartment buildings—should always be available while preventing displacement, strengthening safety nets for small businesses, and building a healthy and resilient ecosystem to help prepare for the next crisis.
We believe in housing and the POWER of homeownership. The equity that is available to homeowners, is something that really drives generational wealth. Increasing rates of homeownership in minority communities can be a force for social healing while transforming challenged neighborhoods into thriving communities.
Focusing on people-centered design, innovative finance, collaboration, and technology we encourage investors to consider emerging markets and riskier neighborhoods and submit unsolicited proposals for social justice projects to governments to heal communities block by block, share lessons learned, local community knowledge and expertise while adopting best practices from places where the housing market broadly works.
We are interested in partnering with public-, private clients or municipalities to provide development consultancy and technical services on their efforts to deliver outstanding, unique, compact, and diverse mixed-use developments and housing that is affordable for all; advance renewable energy solutions; transform cities, and acquire new technology while creating jobs and value for families and businesses.
Segregated communities emerged in the 20th Century as a result of federal, state, and local policies that favor sprawling, lack of diversity, and investment in certain areas. Consequently, black [and later on brown] Americans were for all practical purposes “locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity [economies of agglomeration] for wealth accumulation in American history.” (Anderson, Margo, and Stephen E. Fienberg. 2000).
Over a century ago, Jane Addams, argued that “urban environments directly shaped human behavior.” People’s lives are framed by social arrangements and shaped by the city’s physical environment. “Neighborhoods and homes for working-class families deeply matter to the kind of success that people could obtain when living in those settings.” These communities lack the essential structural institutions and services needed for healthy community life -diverse restaurants, rich cultural institutions, opportunities and thriving businesses, health and security services, affordable housing, environments where people can walk and exercise, playgrounds and children.
As private redlining and public racial discriminatory policies accelerated disinvestment in communities of color, the social fabric was pushed to the limits. Individuals and families were and continued to be, under tremendous pressure: raising children, keeping jobs, taking care of the elderly, and those most vulnerable. Most people adapt and thrive. But for some, the means to survive are not there, and they fall into despair and poverty, while others resort to violence.
Over time the narrative of loose social fabric can reinforce negative perceptions of those neighborhoods. Redlining “hazardous” neighborhoods based on the race of occupants made it impossible for residents in these areas to get mortgages or become homeowners. For the past several decades in America, the need of putting a roof over their heads has steadily come to look more like a luxury.
The goal of the transformative investment is to heal the communities by recognizing the importance of social structures in neighborhoods. And to achieve transformation, we must look beyond narrowly defined district boundaries. And address market-wide opportunities and trends while envisioning alternative models of how social structures can be built and create communities with a sense of belonging.
ASC102: Familia is a place-based community development concept based on a traditional Dutch perimeter block where the Latin courtyard enhances the quantity and quality of resident civic engagement. Cluster Communities marry elements of social contact design with democratic self-governance and intentional social practices designed to build trust and cohesion among neighbors. Courtyards play a central role and are the ideal space for communal interaction and shared activities.
Interaction between people in face-to-face settings allows individuals to learn to work together to solve collective problems and facilitates the development of social trust. ASC102: Familia has the healing of the community at its heart. A community where relationships grow and generate a sense of belonging which results in economic prosperity [growth] of the neighborhood by creating an opportunity for local business, educational, culture, and entertainment. These ingredients contribute towards building a resilient and sustainable community resulting in a healthy housing market.
Self-governing communities of place, such as cluster neighborhoods represent a promising new avenue for enhanced citizen-engagement at the grassroots-community level. These neighborhoods also represent an excellent arena for future impact investment into conditions, necessary and sufficient, to increase intergenerational wealth, and catalyze increased democratic capacity and civic engagement on the part of citizens. We expect positive deviance in civic engagement levels, high levels of trust, social cohesion, and norms of reciprocity including developing a range of democratic capacities, individually and collectively, particularly through engagement in community self-governance via structures of distributed leadership and the use of consensus-based, community decision making processes.
Regular, enjoyable interaction at the courtyards draw residents out of their homes and into interaction with one another. Over shared spaces, residents communicate and build relationships. Information about neighborhood, local, or national issues is routinely shared at activities in these spaces. Opinions are exchanged. Resources are identified. Ideas are hatched and tested. Plans are developed. Commitments are made. Activities are organized.
FOSTER RELATIONSHIPS
Neighbors commit to being part of a community for mutual benefit
Cohousing cultivates a culture of sharing and caring
Cluster housing and size (typically 20-40 homes) promote frequent interaction, close relationships, and regular interdependence.
BALANCING PRIVACY AND COMMUNITY
Designed for privacy as well as community
Residents choose their own level of engagement
PARTICIPATION
Decision making is participatory and often based on consensus
Self-management empowers residents, builds community, and saves money
SHARED VALUES
Cluster communities support residents in actualizing shared values
Typically adopt green approaches to living
If indeed the success of the Beloved Community, in actively supporting, housing that is affordable, social capital and civic capacity building, depends crucially on mutually supporting spatial, social and governance factors, this poses a challenge to the right social contact design concept. ACS: Familia Cluster Housing Model responds adequately to that challenge, developing a substantive sense of community, with potential to activate governance norms and structures, as well as developing a genuine sense of ownership and investment in the idea of community, on the part of residents. This implies a vital creative role for citizens in shaping and claiming their living spaces – not simply consuming them as they might any other commodity in the marketplace.
Cluster communities challenges residents to step away from the dominant narrative of our culture as one composed of rugged individualists, jealous guardians of privacy and independence, and anonymity of the massive housing projects, and asks them to consider others and the disparate viewpoints they invariably represent, in their decision-making on everything from how to manage the family pets to whether it is appropriate to barbecue in the house. Cohousing communities also expect residents to take responsibility for contributing personal time and resources towards supporting the life and well-being of the neighborhood and everyone in it.
It is unclear how many Americans ultimately might be willing to trade a degree of privacy and individual independence to access housing that is affordable and gain the benefits of living in such communities. Since residence in cohousing neighborhoods purchasing and investing (and must be for them to function as well as they do), whether cohousing becomes a mainstream housing option in the United States which in turn serves to foster democracy at the grassroots, is largely a matter of how much demand evolves in the market for this housing option and how effectively the market is able to meet this demand.
Today, with real estate market uncertainty remaining coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, ASC102: Familia is a great example of a project that offers attractive returns with limited downside risk. As investors continue building their portfolio post-COVID-19, preferred equity investments provide the best place to position their capital in the near term.
Thank you,
Gabriel & David
*If you are interested or inspired in the ACS: FAMILIA concept, feel free to contact us and we can set up an introduction meeting.
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