Housing

Subterms

    Latest story

    63 Shares99 Views

    A community collaboration for progress

    by

    While decades of discriminatory policies and practices continue to fuel the affordable housing crisis in the United States, less than three miles from the MIT campus exists a beacon of innovation and community empowerment.“We are very proud to continue MIT’s long-standing partnership with Camfield Estates,” says Catherine D’Ignazio, associate professor of urban science and planning. “Camfield has long been an incubator of creative ideas focused on uplifting their community.”D’Ignazio co-leads a research team focused on housing as part of the MIT Initiative for Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR) led by the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). The group researches the uneven impacts of data, AI, and algorithmic systems on housing in the United States, as well as ways that these same tools could be used to address racial disparities. The Camfield Tenant Association is a research partner providing insight into the issue and relevant data, as well as opportunities for MIT researchers to solve real challenges and make a local impact.

    Play video

    MIT Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism – Housing Video: MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center

    Formerly known as “Camfield Gardens,” the 102-unit housing development in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was among the pioneering sites in the 1990s to engage in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) program aimed at revitalizing disrepaired public housing across the country. This also served as the catalyst for their collaboration with MIT, which began in the early 2000s.“The program gave Camfield the money and energy to tear everything on the site down and build it back up anew, in addition to allowing them to buy the property from the city for $1 and take full ownership of the site,” explains Nolen Scruggs, a master’s student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) who has worked with Camfield over the past few years as part of ICSR’s housing vertical team. “At the time, MIT graduate students helped start a ‘digital divide’ bridge gap program that later evolved into the tech lab that is still there today, continuing to enable residents to learn computer skills and things they might need to get a hand up.”Because of that early collaboration, Camfield Estates reached out to MIT in 2022 to start a new chapter of collaboration with students. Scruggs spent a few months building a team of students from Harvard University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and MIT to work on a housing design project meant to help the Camfield Tenants Association prepare for their looming redevelopment needs.“One of the things that’s been really important to the work of the ICSR housing vertical is historical context,” says Peko Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and mathematics who co-leads the ICSR Housing vertical with D’Ignazio. “We didn’t get to the place we are right now with housing in an instant. There’s a lot of things that have happened in the U.S. like redlining, predatory lending, and different ways of investing in infrastructure that add important contexts.”“Quantitative methods are a great way to look across macroscale phenomena, but our team recognizes and values qualitative and participatory methods as well, to get a more grounded picture of what community needs really are and what kinds of innovations can bubble up from communities themselves,” D’Ignazio adds. “This is where the partnership with Camfield Estates comes in, which Nolen has been leading.”Finding creative solutionsBefore coming to MIT, Scruggs, a proud New Yorker, worked on housing issues while interning for his local congressperson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He called residents to discuss their housing concerns, learning about the affordability issues that were making it hard for lower- and middle-income families to find places to live.“Having this behind-the-scenes experience set the stage for my involvement in Camfield,” Scruggs says, recalling his start at Camfield conducting participatory action research, meeting with Camfield seniors to discuss and capture their concerns.Scruggs says the biggest issue they have been trying to tackle with Camfield is twofold: creating more space for new residents while also helping current residents achieve their end goal of homeownership.“This speaks to some of the larger issues our group at ICSR is working on in terms of housing affordability,” he says. “With Camfield it is looking at where can people with Section 8 vouchers move, what limits do they have, and what barriers do they face — whether it’s through big tech systems, or individual preferences coming from landlords.”Scruggs adds, “The discrimination those people face while trying to find a house, lock it down, talk to a bank, etc. — it can be very, very difficult and discouraging.” Scruggs says one attempt to combat this issue would be through hiring a caseworker to assist people through the process — one of many ideas that came from a Camfield collaboration with the FHLBank Affordable Housing Development Competition.As part of the competition, the goal for Scruggs’s team was to help Camfield tenants understand all of their options and their potential trade-offs, so that in the end they can make informed decisions about what they want to do with their space.“So often redevelopment schemes don’t ensure people can come back.” Scruggs says. “There are specific design proposals being made to ensure that the structure of people’s lifestyles wouldn’t be disrupted.”Scruggs says that tentative recommendations discussed with tenant association president Paulette Ford include replacing the community center with a high-rise development that would increase the number of units available.“I think they are thinking really creatively about their options,” Hosoi says. “Paulette Ford, and her mother before her, have always referred to Camfield as a ‘hand up,’ with the idea that people come to Camfield to live until they can afford a home of their own locally.”Scruggs’s other partnership with Camfield involves working with MIT undergraduate Amelie Nagle as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program to create programing that will teach computer design and coding to Camfield community kids — in the very TechLab that goes back to MIT and Camfield’s first collaboration.“Nolen has a real commitment to community-led knowledge production,” says D’Ignazio. “It has been a pleasure to work with him and see how he takes all his urban planning skills (GIS, mapping, urban design, photography, and more) to work in respectful ways that foreground community innovation.”She adds: “We are hopeful that the process will yield some high-quality architectural and planning ideas, and help Camfield take the next step towards realizing their innovative vision.” More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in Data Management & Statistics

      Generating the policy of tomorrow

      by

      As first-year students in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program within the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Eric Liu and Ashely Peake share an interest in investigating housing inequality issues.

      They also share a desire to dive head-first into their research.

      “In the first year of your PhD, you’re taking classes and still getting adjusted, but we came in very eager to start doing research,” Liu says.

      Liu, Peake, and many others found an opportunity to do hands-on research on real-world problems at the MIT Policy Hackathon, an initiative organized by students in IDSS, including the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). The weekend-long, interdisciplinary event — now in its sixth year — continues to gather hundreds of participants from around the globe to explore potential solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges.

      This year’s theme, “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow,” sought to capitalize on the popularity of generative AI (like the chatbot ChatGPT) and the ways it is changing how we think about technical and policy-based challenges, according to Dansil Green, a second-year TPP master’s student and co-chair of the event.

      “We encouraged our teams to utilize and cite these tools, thinking about the implications that generative AI tools have on their different challenge categories,” Green says.

      After 2022’s hybrid event, this year’s organizers pivoted back to a virtual-only approach, allowing them to increase the overall number of participants in addition to increasing the number of teams per challenge by 20 percent.

      “Virtual allows you to reach more people — we had a high number of international participants this year — and it helps reduce some of the costs,” Green says. “I think going forward we are going to try and switch back and forth between virtual and in-person because there are different benefits to each.”

      “When the magic hits”

      Liu and Peake competed in the housing challenge category, where they could gain research experience in their actual field of study. 

      “While I am doing housing research, I haven’t necessarily had a lot of opportunities to work with actual housing data before,” says Peake, who recently joined the SES doctoral program after completing an undergraduate degree in applied math last year. “It was a really good experience to get involved with an actual data problem, working closer with Eric, who’s also in my lab group, in addition to meeting people from MIT and around the world who are interested in tackling similar questions and seeing how they think about things differently.”

      Joined by Adrian Butterton, a Boston-based paralegal, as well as Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan, two software engineers from Canada, Liu and Peake formed what would end up being the winning team in their category: “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat.” They quickly began organizing a plan to address the eviction crisis in the United States.

      “I think we were kind of surprised by the scope of the question,” Peake laughs. “In the end, I think having such a large scope motivated us to think about it in a more realistic kind of way — how could we come up with a solution that was adaptable and therefore could be replicated to tackle different kinds of problems.”

      Watching the challenge on the livestream together on campus, Liu says they immediately went to work, and could not believe how quickly things came together.

      “We got our challenge description in the evening, came out to the purple common area in the IDSS building and literally it took maybe an hour and we drafted up the entire project from start to finish,” Liu says. “Then our software engineer partners had a dashboard built by 1 a.m. — I feel like the hackathon really promotes that really fast dynamic work stream.”

      “People always talk about the grind or applying for funding — but when that magic hits, it just reminds you of the part of research that people don’t talk about, and it was really a great experience to have,” Liu adds.

      A fresh perspective

      “We’ve organized hackathons internally at our company and they are great for fostering innovation and creativity,” says Letizia Bordoli, senior AI product manager at Veridos, a German-based identity solutions company that provided this year’s challenge in Data Systems for Human Rights. “It is a great opportunity to connect with talented individuals and explore new ideas and solutions that we might not have thought about.”

      The challenge provided by Veridos was focused on finding innovative solutions to universal birth registration, something Bordoli says only benefited from the fact that the hackathon participants were from all over the world.

      “Many had local and firsthand knowledge about certain realities and challenges [posed by the lack of] birth registration,” Bordoli says. “It brings fresh perspectives to existing challenges, and it gave us an energy boost to try to bring innovative solutions that we may not have considered before.”

      New frontiers

      Alongside the housing and data systems for human rights challenges was a challenge in health, as well as a first-time opportunity to tackle an aerospace challenge in the area of space for environmental justice.

      “Space can be a very hard challenge category to do data-wise since a lot of data is proprietary, so this really developed over the last few months with us having to think about how we could do more with open-source data,” Green explains. “But I am glad we went the environmental route because it opened the challenge up to not only space enthusiasts, but also environment and climate people.”

      One of the participants to tackle this new challenge category was Yassine Elhallaoui, a system test engineer from Norway who specializes in AI solutions and has 16 years of experience working in the oil and gas fields. Elhallaoui was a member of Team EcoEquity, which proposed an increase in policies supporting the use of satellite data to ensure proper evaluation and increase water resiliency for vulnerable communities.

      “The hackathons I have participated in in the past were more technical,” Elhallaoui says. “Starting with [MIT Science and Technology Policy Institute Director Kristen Kulinowski’s] workshop about policy writers and the solutions they came up with, and the analysis they had to do … it really changed my perspective on what a hackathon can do.”

      “A policy hackathon is something that can make real changes in the world,” she adds. More