New York Roundtable: Architecture and the Right to Housing

What does the right to housing mean in practice, and how can architects and other urban professionals contribute? Architecture and the Right to Housing, a Pan-American program series organized by the University of Toronto’s Architecture and Housing Justice Lab from 2023 to 2025, convened leaders in the field for daylong roundtables in various cities to share their responses.

Below is an excerpt from the gathering in New York, which took place at the New School University Center this past October. Around the table were community organizer and activist Robert Robinson; Cea Weaver, director of the NYC Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; housing policy analyst Samuel Stein; Urban Homesteading Assistance Board executive director Margy Brown; Matthew Charney, vice president of design and construction at NYCHA; and professor Laura Sara Wainer. They were joined by architects Brian Baldor, Nathan Rich, Brian Loughlin, and Deborah Gans.

Untapped will publish edited transcripts from the program’s other roundtables in the coming months.


ROBERT ROBINSON: I’m formerly homeless. I spent two and a half years on the streets in Miami, and ten months in a New York City homeless shelter.

I called the experience, “the transformation of Rob Robertson.” It made me look at the world differently. I started to ask a lot of questions: How did this happen to me? Why does everybody out here on the streets look like me? What are the factors that led to this? I started to do a lot of self-reflecting and critical thinking.

My focus now is, how do we change the situation? I was fortunate as an activist and organizer to have exposure to academics—like Dr. Peter Marcuse and Neil Smith—who thought outside the box, but didn’t think they knew everything. Practice and theory need to exist side by side. Neil demanded that. And I’ve approached my work that way.

When I first came into organizing, it was impressed upon me that you can’t work with academia, and you can’t work with lawyers. At one point, I was very active in moving people sleeping on the streets into vacant spaces. Suddenly I needed lawyers, because I was being accused of trespassing. So I got rid of that thinking and have embraced building relationships with them ever since.

Peter once said, “Rob has a foot in academia, a foot in policymaking, a foot in community, and a foot in government. He has four feet. I don’t know how he does it, but he seems to do it pretty well.” Working with him, Neil, and others has really given me, as an organizer, a voice in an incredible way that not a lot of people realize.

I also know I need to give back to the community, to—as Neil would say—practice reciprocal learning: bring the academy into the community, the community into the academy. That’s how [the work] continues to regenerate knowledge, year after year after year.

CEA WEAVER: The right to housing connects to an overall struggle to defend democracy at a moment when it’s under attack. It also connects to tenants’ rights, and how they are connected to an overall fight to protect democracy.

Seventy percent of New York City residents rent, but we are typically underrepresented in the political system. There are two hundred and thirteen state lawmakers who represent us in Albany, and forty-six of them are renters. I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head in New York City, but I’m sure it’s quite similar.

The reality is that renters are not represented in our political system, and the results are staggering: We have a very unaffordable city, and a huge part of that is that every aspect of our housing system, including those who are representing us, is designed around the rights of property owners.

That is connected to the rise of fascism. There are two points that I want to make. The first [relates to] a study from Princeton University that found that a one percent decrease in evictions would have led to a three percent increase in voter turnout among renters in the 2016 presidential election. That could have changed the trajectory of the election, because we know that renters, when they vote, tend to vote Democratic or they tend to vote progressive. So there is a fundamental, life-changing connection [between renters and] whether or not we can elect a real estate developer into the highest office in the United States.

The second point is from a study from the University of Oxford on rental markets and radical far-right support. They studied political parties in Germany and found that rising rents, particularly among lower-income people and working-class people, are correlated with increasing support for far-right political parties. And so, we have to tackle tenant representation in our democracy, and we have to tackle the rising cost of rents if we are serious about fighting fascism on a practical level.

There’s a more direct level, too: Right now, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the opportunity exists for Zohran Mamdani to run the most renter-dense city in the United States: what that’s going to look like, and what we need to do in order to truly turn the tide on a city that’s been run by real estate for a very long time. But also to do that in a city that has a robust, rich, and I think, the strongest tenant movement in the country.

When I’m thinking about the right to housing and what it means, I try to focus on these connections: What does it mean to be represented in our democracy? What does it mean to resist fascism and authoritarianism? How is that connected to our homes and where we live, and who is representing us?

SAMUEL STEIN: I work at the Community Service Society of New York. It’s an anti-poverty group that has done a lot of things over the years, from co-writing the original tenement laws and piloting some of the first public housing to supporting the major tenant bills that have passed in state legislature over the last six years, preserving public housing to the best of New York’s ability.

The point of my job, as I understand it, is to be a part of the research arm of the tenant movement. Most tenant organizations don’t have research staff. My coworkers and I do research that will drive the campaigns of the tenant movement. We don’t set the agenda; we support the agenda to the best of our ability.

We also act as a kind of historical memory. We can remind people that we tried things, and of why they didn’t work. Maybe we can even try something else, in a way that’s hopefully not discouraging to the people with the energy to do the thing.

I don’t really think a lot about the right to housing. We don’t have one here. I don’t think saying that we have one helps, either.

I don’t think establishing a right to housing in law does anything unless that means something. [It would need] a serious Housing First program, where every homeless person moves into a vacant apartment, gets the services they need, and is then a tenant like any other.

That’s a right to housing, but that would take another specific set of rights to actually build up. It would take funding, it would take building, it would take all these other things. It’s like, the right is not the thing—unless it regulates the existing power relations between people.

MARGY BROWN: I’m the executive director of UHAB, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board. We are a fifty-plus-year organization that is primarily known for establishing affordable cooperative housing. Affordable co-ops are a lot of what we do, but it is really a byproduct of what we are about, which is community control and housing. A lot of what we do is organizing and helping tenants understand different models of ownership in housing, and ultimately, getting the model of ownership they want.

Many tenants want to be in rent-stabilized housing. They may be in rent-stabilized housing, but they want to remain in rent-stabilized housing in better housing. We primarily work in communities that have been very marginalized. So the opportunity to have home ownership, and the long-term intergenerational implications of housing stability for those households, is very meaningful. We help transform the physical space of buildings and the ownership of buildings for tenants to become homeowners.

Another byproduct of engaging with tenants about the housing they want is preservation. These people overwhelmingly want to stay in their homes. We love new construction. We think there needs to be more housing. But for people to be able to stay in their homes, as renters or homeowners in rehabilitated homes—and with long-term stability—is really what we are here to make happen.

We think of construction as being potentially a short period. It often is not. Some people say, “The prospect of being out of my home for three years, five years, in some cases ten years—those are the formative years of the lives of my children. I want to be in this building and with this community for those years.” Or they will say, “Those are my last ten years, or my last five years, and I don’t want to move from my home.”

And so we’re constantly in conversations with architects. We have seen a lot of architects that regularly do affordable housing. But when we [mention] preservation—preservation with people in place wherever possible—we get a lot of drop-off in terms of who will work with us.

We hear a lot of architects talk about wanting to innovate, but a lot of that innovation is around new construction-type innovation. Innovation that allows people to stay in place during the period of construction is so important. We often hear that it’s just not possible—but then, as we’re going through projects, an architect might say, “Well, we could do this,” and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s innovation!” Finding and developing the sector around the mission of this work is fundamental to making community control happen.

MATTHEW CHARNEY: I’m an architect for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). I’ve been working for NYCHA for almost ten years now. NYCHA, at my level, is the largest public housing authority in the country, New York City’s largest landlord, and North America’s largest. We have about five hundred thousand residents.

Public housing in this country is essentially two programs, which we call, colloquially, Section Nine and Section Eight. Section Nine is traditional public housing: It’s government-owned, operated, and funded by Section Nine. We have about three hundred thousand residents living in Section Nine.

Section Eight, which is often called “leased housing,” is where we have vouchers given to individuals or projects, or the vouchers are tied to an apartment. We have about two hundred thousand residents in Section Eight in New York City.

Nationally it’s by far a different story: One and a half million residents are still in traditional public housing in the country, with more than five million in Section Eight.

Among other things, architecture plays a role in this, for certain. Many of our buildings are nearly a century old. They’re falling apart, and in need of repair and a baseline.

Improvements we’re working on include making apartments [ADA compliant]. We’re making sustainability improvements, having [invested] seventy million dollars in electrification. We’re not converting all of our old boilers to electric, but we’re trying to where it makes sense.

We’re also installing solar panels, getting rid of lead-based paint. We’re interested in doing new construction, and in doing it where we more directly impact existing NYCHA residents. We’re exploring doing a build-first strategy, where we build a new building, move people in, and tear down the buildings [they were previously living in] as people move out.

BRIAN BALDOR: I’m an architect. I also don’t think design can do [this] alone.

There’s a certain idealism that’s built into the discipline [of architecture]. When I was studying it, we had to make up a project for ourselves. We studied the Tijuana border in terms of the ecologies, in terms of the economy, then tried to identify a problem—and a solution—without a budget or client. Ultimately we came to realize that these solutions have to start somewhere other than the design studio.

I work with a group of architects at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). We’re charged with finding design solutions to housing during a housing crisis: a crisis of affordability, of supply, and certainly insufficient resources, to build everything that we would like to—all operating within a situation of tremendous income inequality, which is fundamentally what’s driving the problem that we are not directly solving through housing. Nevertheless, I see our role as working with, and sometimes fighting against, the idea of efficiency.

That’s something that, of course, is fundamental to development and to housing. We have a certain budget. The language of HPD is very much about quantifying, and there’s units and dollars and people. There’s a lot of pressure to build housing where the units are smaller, more standardized, so you can have more of them with limited resources.

Over the years, we’ve tried a number of things that get at this idea of efficiency. We’ve explored how small a unit you can put people into without it being a dehumanizing experience, while also looking at the building overall, at the common space and the quality of those small units.

We’ve also done shared housing, which is a continuation of that same idea. How can you find efficiencies in terms of the money and the space, but allow people to actually have a broader lived experience? How can we build something different? We look at modular housing, off-site construction, and solutions to make our buildings more accessible.

I don’t think any of us necessarily want to live in a city that is built to absolute efficiency, because you lose some [nuances] that people need. If you look at the idea, even the very language we use, the word unit is somewhat incompatible with the idea of home. So we keep design existing in between those two, [finding ways to] be both.

NATHAN RICH: I’m an architect. My office is called Peterson Rich Office. We work with a lot of cultural institutions in the city, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

In parallel to that, we work with NYCHA. It’s a very interesting position as an architect because much of my days are spent dealing with the nuts-and-bolts realities of construction and buildings, and the economics of construction.

We serve as a bridge between some of this, say, pure architectural work, and some of the realities that NYCHA deals with. We sit somewhere between vision and implementation.

We’ve developed an approach with Matthew [Charney] and his team for how to get these projects done in a responsible, tenant-engaged way. It involves a seven-step process of what we call “property assessments,” where we play a role in looking at the projects, figuring out what can be done, and leading community workshops that engage the tenants at each of these places.

I want to establish an optimistic position for architecture at this table. [In our experience, it is possible to set up] a one-to-one relationship between the process that we established with NYCHA with the tenants—so that what’s actually getting implemented, will serve them.

LAURA SARA WAINER: For the last few years, I’ve been a professor at City College’s School of Architecture. It’s not the only public school of architecture out there, but it is what many consider to be the flagship school of architecture in the city. I want to talk about the pedagogical perspective of the architect’s responsibility in discussions about housing.

As a teacher in public schools, of students who want to become the leaders of their own communities, I feel the responsibility of trying to understand the role of architecture beyond the idea of a project, and beyond the idea of a better or a less-good project.

We can be better or worse, but we are very bad in policy discussions. We’re very bad at understanding financial nuances. We’re almost seen as naïve when we try to explain how our design determinism is going to change very complex social realities.

I would argue that there is a terrain between that and a good project. And that terrain, to me, is the engagement of design with non-design problems. Things like: How can design improve a family’s financial strategy when they want to build their house? How can design have a correlation with a typical type of social organization, or collective organization of a community trust, or a cooperative that wants to build and reclaim ownership?

BRIAN LOUGHLIN: I’m the principal of Magnusson Architecture and Planning, and I’m also one of the co-chairs for AIA New York’s Housing Committee.

Our firm is based in New York City. We’re one of the only firms that exclusively does affordable housing, mixed income, and community development. We do supportive housing, purpose-built shelters—that’s our entire portfolio. This creates challenges and limitations, but it also makes for interesting opportunities. We do a lot of work with Matt [Matthew Charney] and with NYCHA.

In the first exhibition put on by Philip Johnson at MoMA about modern architecture [in 1932], all the housing got stuck in the back room. So automatically, modern architecture and housing had this very tenuous relationship. It’s important to recognize that, within the architecture community, large housing [has long] had a challenge.

I worked in public housing in a couple of different cities, including New York, for almost twenty years. And I moved out of public housing, recognizing that I thought housing, in many ways, had a public relations problem and a branding problem [that extends] all the way down to the architects who are doing the designing.

And so I saw becoming co-chair as an opportunity to reshape what that brand and public relations messaging might look like. I wanted to change it.

DEBORAH GANS: Everyone has been enlightening us as to how no one is the complete solution, though we’re certainly part of a larger vision for housing, policy, and design.

So what can an architect do? Architects envision futures, right? Often with communities, which Nathan’s work shows. It’s like science fiction: You build the world you imagine.

If you don’t have people helping you imagine it, you’re not going to build it. If that imagination embeds thoughts about policy, community, and values, it’s really, really important. And to the degree that we instead have a dystopian vision of a corporate world built by finance, we need to fight against it—and believe it or not, images can.

An architect’s imagination, with the help of people who know about policy, with the help of the community, can help move things [forward].


This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It is part of Untapped’s collaboration with Architecture and the Right to Housing, in which transcripts from the program’s roundtable discussions will be published to offer insights and candid conversations for your consideration.