Redesigning the American Dream

Check out this interview with Dolores Hayden in which she exhorts the need for non-profit developers in the housing market.

One of the real issues is, I suppose, how you get more non-profit developers into the game. I don’t think we can rely on big for-profit developers to bring that much innovation to this country. We haven’t seen it. And in the 40’s and the 50’s there was a terrific shift in terms of the size of most development companies. I think that while there may be competition to sell different kinds of units, there’s not enough competition to come up with energy efficient, sustainable neighborhoods for people of mixed incomes that also have the kind of public space you’re interested in seeing. Getting this for mixed incomes is particularly difficult because of the whole history of segregation by race and class in this country. Many developers feel much more comfortable building a whole bunch of $400,000 houses than they do building something that has a mixture of units of different sizes and different prices.

[via Urban Cartography]