Currently teaching a housing studio at Columbia’s Graduate School for Architecture Preservation and Planning.
BR
“Some people of Loisaida are an explosion transcending what humans know about how to struggle. They are breaking the barriers that have blinded and kept us from seeing and thinking. The magnetism created by these human beings attracts—is positive—and belongs to every living organism on this planet. Romantic?”1
In the East Village and historic Loisaida, multi-family housing is a micro-political site where difference and negotiation are confronted daily. Our site is situated within a zone where housing has consistently been at the center of resistance movements and policy changes. From early light and air regulations shaped by tenement housing, to the waves of gentrification and real estate developers renaming neighborhoods, housing in this part of the city has been a contested terrain.
In the late 20th century, extreme neglect by landlords and the city pushed residential buildings into disrepair, but communities practiced collective self-reliance to make homes livable. Across these examples, communities have proven to find alternative forms of housing including urban homesteading, cooperative ownership, and other housing justice initiatives. It’s here that domestic life thrives on self-determination and cultural invention.
The legacy of solidarity between marginalized groups, who have faced housing insecurity in the city, reminds us that housing is never only about shelter but about belonging, security, and collective living. For those who move often—migrants, refugees, those with insecure housing, those in exile—objects and domestic practice symbolize a sacred tie to another place or to ideas of home. It is in these details that ‘home’ acquires meaning, carrying sentimental value deeper than any notion of property or power. In Manhattan’s density, domesticity also reveals how diverse communities share space and develop emergent, hyperlocalized codes of cohabitation.