Cycles of Change

Across American cities, the commercial real estate market is undergoing one of the most dramatic revaluations in modern financial history. Buildings that sold for hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago are being appraised at fractions of those figures today. Office towers in Chicago, Denver, [...]

A high school robotics student riding the bus through Los Angeles sees something that most adults have stopped noticing. Tent encampments line the concrete highway overpasses in clusters that shift position every few weeks but never actually disappear. The television news frames this as a political [...]

Homelessness in Los Angeles is not primarily a housing supply constraint but a pipeline problem, because the system connecting the street to housing has never been engineered. That distinction is the central idea that underpins the Material Dignity Infrastructure (MDI) approach, and it changes what [...]

The sociological concept of the "leisured indigent," introduced by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, describes people who use public spaces without a commercial reason. These individuals, who are often homeless, show a form of urban agency that challenges modern [...]