Spring 2021 Issue - 72

landwrites
of inactivity rather than blocking a neighborhood's human energy. Parking has long
been a development driver, but parking
ratios have been falling as cities emphasize pedestrian and mass-transit mobility.
But what if cars were treated like movable
furniture on a site? Permeable pavement,
structured grass surfaces, interlocking grids,
and other woonerf-style solutions can mix
heavy uses (nearly vegetation-free) with
slower and lower uses (green space, when
not housing automobiles). This approach
deemphasizes pavement, curbs, and barriers while slowing cars. The lines separating
public and private are blurred.

Housing-Asset
Management
and the
Challenges of
the Pandemic
and Social
Justice
Movement
HAROLD NASSAU

Where Redesigns Can Work
This " third way " is not without precedent.
Raleigh Springs Mall in Memphis, for
instance, was razed and replaced with a
large retention/recreational lake, police and
fire facilities, a skate park, and a new public
library. European examples include Vauban,
a neighborhood in Freiburg, Germany, that
has proved to be a financial and planning
success at creating community through
sustainable and community-focused design.
The Dutch city of Houton began a similarly
scaled expansion in the late 1970s and
has continued to add tens of thousands of
housing units without sacrificing pedestrian
primacy and community benefits. On-theboards examples include Traumhaus Funari,
which seeks to redevelop the former Benjamin Franklin barracks at the U.S. Army base
in Mannheim, Germany.
The months and years ahead are bound
to be both turbulent and triumphant in the
journey to a more equitable and diverse
society. Mall sites provide lessons of past
failures as well as an enormous opportunity to create a movement toward rebirth.
Learning from history's missteps and redirecting priorities toward sustainable and
just development will help fulfill the promise of the nation's founding. UL
S EAN SLATE R is principal of RDC (formerly
RDCollaborative), based in San Diego.

72

U R B A N LA N D

LandWrites_SP21.indd 72

A clarion call for change in
asset management.

A year ago, we all believed that we
knew what stable housing meant, what
it required, and what asset management
entailed.
We were wrong.
The pandemic has exposed major gaps
in our practice concerning what people
need, how people work, and how our real
estate functions in communities. These
gaps include the following:
l Security. This once meant tenure security, or security from crime. Now we know
that food security also matters, as does
health security. During the coronavirus
pandemic, many of our residents were
food or health insecure.
l Resident voices. Before COVID-19, we
sought to hear resident voices through resident community meetings. Now we know
that broadband-availability, accessibility,
and affordability-is as essential a utility
as electricity and phone service.
l Resident services. Our pre-COVID organizations knew only abstractly that resident
services were important to successful
tenancies. Now we know that such services are a critical dimension of providing
property management in a crisis and even
successful workouts.
l Social and racial justice. A year ago, we
thought that doing our part to challenge
injustice meant delivering high-quality
affordable housing. The pandemic has
shown that where you live strongly influences how healthy you can be, and that
social or racial exclusion hurts a whole
community's health.
We, the owners and operators who
work in affordable multifamily housing,
need to rebuild our asset management
protocols from the ground up.

Same Mission Viewed through
New Eyes
For more than a year, we have coped with
social distancing, hoping that things would
go back to normal. But even as the vaccines take hold and the contagion risk
recedes, we will never go back to our previous unawareness. From now on, when we
speak of creating inclusive communities

SPRING 2021

3/31/21 3:56 PM
Spring 2021 Issue

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Spring 2021 Issue
