New York Must Plan Housing and Transit as One Urban Project

New York’s housing challenge is not only how many homes to build. It is also where demand and available land meet, what kinds of homes suit changing patterns of family and work, and whether housing can help organize the city around transit, public space, services, and civic life.

That is the frame Felipe Correa brought to Collective Living and the Architectural Imaginary, written with Anthony Averbeck and Devin Dobrowolski. The book examines how architects have imagined people living together across the twentieth century, and how those ideas have shaped parts of cities. Correa calls housing a cultural project: one that many disciplines can help define, but no single discipline can define alone.

The book uses “collective living” as an umbrella for spatial, legal, and organizational arrangements that mediate between a private dwelling and the larger systems that support it. The collective, in Correa’s formulation, is not a predetermined social model. It emerges from the way housing, domestic life, and urban systems meet. A project can therefore make an argument about how a community lives, not merely provide a given number of apartments.

Correa laid out five propositions. Housing should drive urban transformation rather than passively follow it. Collective living can produce more than the sum of its units. Design can help make ways of living possible before existing urban systems know how to accommodate them. Drawing is a language for research, not just a way to present a finished idea. And housing types are defined not only by units per hectare, but by the lifestyles their arrangements enable.

That last distinction shifts attention from density as a single metric to the domestic life a building makes possible. A courtyard building, a point tower, and a large block may hold homes at different densities, but each arranges the relationship among private space, shared space, and the city differently. For Correa, the variety of those arrangements is where questions of domesticity and urban life become tangible.

The book makes the comparison systematic. It assembles 60 case studies in ten chapters, with six projects per chapter. Five cases in each chapter are built; the sixth is unbuilt, included because its images have had influence in architectural culture. Correa and his team redrew the projects using a consistent set of conventions, including axonometrics, sections, plans, and analytical drawings. The method lets projects from different places and periods be read against one another.

Drawing, in this account, does more than illustrate a conclusion. It provides a shared visual language for asking what different housing forms make possible. The book’s fold-out cover doubles as an index of the projects, with information such as architect, location, units, and construction area. Inside, those same projects are regrouped to make arguments about themes such as communal living, micro-living, inner-city residual sites, and historic-core retrofits. Correa’s point is that a comparative method can make the differences between housing types legible without reducing them to a density figure.

One chapter considers projects that move beyond the individual residential cell. The question is how to make parts of domestic life shareable without erasing privacy: what can be held in common, and how can private homes relate to a larger community?

Correa used Berlin’s Kurfürstenstrasse Group Housing as a contemporary example. Its double-height spaces are shared among multiple units, while more private areas are arranged around them. This nesting of shared and private space shapes the building’s form: it makes an urban corner on the outside and a courtyard within. The shared spaces are part of the design logic that connects domestic organization to the shape of the block.

The chapter also reaches back to Moscow’s Narkomfin Building, a foundational Soviet communal-housing experiment. Its original scheme proposed different unit types alongside a communal building with a kitchen, dining hall, gym, and library. Correa emphasized the political history of these arrangements: ideas about dissolving the conventional residential unit arose in part from Soviet collectivization and the proposed dissolution of the family unit. In market economies, he said, related spatial ideas have largely been taken up as matters of individual choice.

The contrast matters because a shared kitchen or flexible unit does not carry one fixed social meaning. The same spatial idea can be part of a state project of collectivization or a voluntary arrangement in a market setting. The book’s definition of collective living makes room for that variation: the collective takes shape through the relationship among dwellings, shared facilities, legal arrangements, and the larger urban context.

Rosie Tilley connected the idea to development practice through two precedents she sees as useful: the Paraguay Suipacha ateliers in Buenos Aires, which combine working studios below with homes above, and Songpa Micro-Housing in Seoul, where compact units are organized through interlocking modules. In Gowanus, she said, Charney is building subsidized artist studios in response to the rezoning’s requirement to replace space for the existing arts community. The company has opened its first such space in partnership with Arts Gowanus, which will rent the studios at subsidized rates.

The arrangement puts housing and work in the same development, making a complementary use part of the project rather than treating apartments as its only purpose. Tilley said the studios could support the continuing presence of Gowanus’s arts community, and that it would be welcome if artists also lived in the building. She presented that as one example of mixing uses, not as a claim that housing and studios automatically produce a shared community.

Micro-living raises a related question about what the home must contain. Correa described it as reducing livable space to an extreme while compensating through urban amenities around it, using New York studio apartments as an example. Tilley’s development perspective adds a practical consideration: residents of efficient homes spend time outside them, so common kitchens, lounges, and co-working areas need to work for a broad range of residents. A compact unit’s relationship to shared space and the surrounding city becomes more consequential.

Correa described New York’s twentieth-century housing challenge as building an urban transect: a range of lifestyles and price points from center to periphery. Two forces shaped that pattern. Verticalization, enabled by the elevator and building forms that brought in light, asked how much density could be concentrated while retaining basic conditions of sun and ventilation. Decentralization, first through rail lines and later private mobility, asked how far low-density urbanization could extend.

He framed the twenty-first-century challenge differently. Instead of expanding onto new territory, New York must bridge the gap between where demand exists and where land is available through densification and reuse of underused or derelict land. In short, the task is to consolidate the existing transect.

That requires thinking about infrastructure as a potential framework for housing, not only as a constraint. Correa argued that the proposed Interborough Express should be treated as a comprehensive urban project rather than merely a transit solution. In his view, it could help form a new arc of density between Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, bringing housing together with transit capacity, services, and recreational amenities. He described the line as a midpoint in a larger urban strategy: one that might create a third concentration of housing between those existing centers.

His presentation’s map and cross-section made the proposal spatial. It showed Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn as existing concentrations, with the Interborough Express between them and a new area of urban growth marked along the route. Correa’s argument was that transit could be the basis for organizing a larger piece of the city, not simply a way to move passengers through it. For that to happen, he said, the line would need to be conceived as part of a coordinated urban project that also addresses housing, services, and recreation.

He also named Hunts Point and other post-industrial areas as places whose future should not be defined only by what they used to be. Correa argued that cities need to reconsider mono-functional infrastructure and prepare streets and blocks for development. As he put it:

His examples from elsewhere show what he means by designing around a site’s constraints. One Santa Fe in Los Angeles uses a long building to mediate between an urban block and rail infrastructure. Schlangenbader Strasse in Berlin places housing over a highway, using the project to bridge the areas on either side. Pedregulho in Rio de Janeiro works with steep topography through a long building whose access route runs along its fourth floor. Correa’s interest is not in copying any one of these forms, but in asking how their strategies might help New York address its own conditions.

Correa described Pedregulho’s access arrangement in particular detail. Duplex homes above and below the fourth-floor entry mean that residents generally have to climb only two floors to reach a unit. The building retains an elevator, which Correa said is useful for accessibility and carrying heavy items; the stairs serve most residents moving between the access level and their homes. He said the arrangement reduced construction costs at a time when elevators were especially expensive.

The comparison leads directly to a New York proposal. Correa suggested that a combination of the Los Angeles and Berlin strategies could help the city think about the Cross Bronx Expressway: parts might be decked and urban blocks partly constructed without erasing the highway’s history and presence. The goal, he said, would be to rescale the infrastructure and improve the relationship between blocks and mobility systems.

He also pointed to Hunts Point, where he argued that post-industrial land should be considered in terms of what it could become, rather than only its former use. Reorganizing infrastructure and the urban grid, in his view, could prepare blocks for housing and other development. He called for cities to be active in preparing land, rather than simply asking developers to build.

Correa described the proposed Meadowlands Park in New Jersey as another opportunity to reconsider a landscape where large-scale infrastructure had accumulated. He said a new park could help establish a different identity for the area and support residential development better connected to mass transit. These sites, alongside the Cross Bronx and Hunts Point, formed part of a larger question in his presentation: whether New York should plan housing and mobility together at the metropolitan scale.

Correa asked whether New York was ready for a larger mobility ring linking transportation, services, infrastructure, and housing. He cited the Paris Express Metro System as a model, arguing that it had helped support areas outside the périphérique economically. He also referred to work in São Paulo connecting the transformation of the Tietê River with road and hydrological rings that could become centers for new housing infrastructure. These examples extend his central proposition: regional transportation and housing can be considered as parts of the same urban project.

Correa’s final move was back to domestic life. He described the office as a twentieth-century social condenser: a place where people worked, ate, met, and formed relationships. In service economies, he argued, much of that activity has moved into the home and is mediated through screens. His question was what could play the role of the social condenser in the twenty-first century. His answer was housing and urban life designed together to create settings for connection.

Toby Snyder organized FXCollaborative’s examples around conversion, hybridization, and scaling. Across them, the design task is not to begin with an empty site. It is to find out what an existing building or infrastructure can support, then work through the circulation, structure, and program that make a new use possible.

At 95 Madison, a 1906 office building, the firm is reversing the building’s original arrangement. Snyder said its first 15 floors were offices, with a residential penthouse above. Now, as the office space no longer attracts the tenants needed for a modern office building, the lower two or three floors will remain commercial and the upper floors will become apartments.

The structure and circulation shaped the conversion. The office building had a split core and a regular 20-foot structural grid. Apartments need different depths and circulation from full-floor offices, while office buildings often have more vertical circulation than the residential conversion requires. Snyder said the team studied different core arrangements and found that a new core, inserted after clearing some backyard space, could create floor-through units. The layouts bend around the existing columns and offer apartments with different depths and exposures.

The project also uses New York’s rules for measuring residential square footage to move space from the lower part of the building to its top. Snyder described the result as a townhouse-like penthouse: a new kind of domestic space at the top of the building. Because the building is subject to landmark preservation, the addition is not visible from the street. The project retains the main part of the structure, cuts through floors to install new elevator cores, and restores the facade. It changes the use and the circulation while keeping the exterior’s street-facing appearance.

A second example, 144 St. Felix in Brooklyn, adds housing above a disused church near the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower. Snyder framed the project as a response to changing institutional use: the congregation no longer needed the building, but the church remained a strong part of the streetscape. The design preserves its facade and structure while adding a contemporary residential tower above. The new construction responds to the base’s materials, vertical lines, texture, and detail; Snyder said the layout of the homes also takes cues from the church facade.

This is not a simple choice between preservation and new construction. The project depends on keeping the existing building legible while making a new use viable above it. Snyder described the addition as part of a larger ensemble that includes the nearby Williamsburgh Savings Bank, not just an extension of the church. The building’s older structure sets conditions for the new homes, even as the addition makes a much greater amount of space possible.

Hybrid buildings put distinct uses into one structure, but the arrangement is not only a matter of stacking functions. It determines who enters where, how circulation works, and what the building offers at street level. Snyder described institutional uses at the base as street-oriented and housing above as view-oriented. Putting them together can benefit both, but it makes the ground floor and the building section more demanding to design.

At 77 Greenwich Street, a public school and retail occupy the base, with a residential tower above. The site had been an old Syms store; the project also incorporates a renovated townhouse. Its ground floor has to fit residential entrances, school access, retail, subway stairs, and the preserved building. Snyder emphasized that these uses make the ground plane complicated: different users and forms of access have to meet in a limited area.

That complexity is part of the project’s design problem, not a finishing detail. The school needs an entrance and space in front of it; the residential lobby and retail each need their own access; subway infrastructure also occupies the site. Snyder described the work of making those pieces fit as a major part of designing a hybrid building. The vertical arrangement may look simple in a diagram, but it depends on resolving the sectional and circulation demands where the building meets the street.

Snyder made a similar point about the HDSN proposal, which he described as 1,550 homes, 30 percent of them affordable, alongside a hotel, retail, and community spaces over rail infrastructure. The proposal involves intensive structural work and vertical circulation, including multiple cores serving different users. Snyder noted that an arrangement of this kind might look like a courtyard building if it were five stories high; at much greater height, it takes the form of a tower. Its form is related to how the uses and circulation are organized.

FXCollaborative’s Anable Basin work in Long Island City involved separate proposals for different owners and developers around a former industrial waterfront. Snyder described plans that combine housing with recreation and community spaces and public space intended to clean up and activate the land. He said the proposals concern a larger ecosystem of spaces around the housing, not only the number of units. He described the broader site as accommodating 7,000 homes.

Other waterfront projects extend the same approach. Snyder said Monitor Point had recently been approved through ULURP and would include 1,324 homes, half of them affordable, along with open space and a museum. The site had been used as an MTA vehicle-washing station. He described Hudson Landing, a project at the Intrepid museum site where buses are currently parked, as a proposal for 1,127 homes, 30 percent affordable. He said it would include a mix of rental and ownership homes, market-rate and subsidized units, micro-units, and larger homes. The proposal also includes a public park and a bridge connecting to the museum across the West Side Highway.

The projects show different ways of treating the ground as part of the housing proposition. At Anable Basin, Snyder linked public space to activating and cleaning up a former industrial site. At Monitor Point, landscape and a museum are part of the plan for a former vehicle-washing site. At Hudson Landing, he described connections to the existing museum and the surrounding landscape as part of the development. In each instance, the housing is presented alongside public or community uses that shape how the site meets its neighborhood.

Snyder also described amenity spaces at higher levels as a way to bring residents together. In large buildings, he said, new social spaces can be created at higher vantage points. The challenge is to make the scale of a large project support shared life, rather than letting its units and circulation remain disconnected pieces.

Snyder’s concern with scale runs from the room plan to the facade. A large residential building, he argued, remains an assemblage of small spaces. The design has to make a building that can hold hundreds of homes while still responding to the dimensions and experience of an individual resident.

Court Square Tower in Long Island City, which FXCollaborative designed with Charney Companies, brought that problem into focus. Snyder described a constrained plan with an intense central core. Each home has to work around it while receiving light, air, and views. The floor plan is therefore not simply a repetition of identical units around a generic center; it is an effort to make the available perimeter and the limited core work together.

He showed room modules for bedrooms, living rooms, and corner living rooms, each drawn with a human figure for scale. The dimensions become a way to test how a repeated unit relates to a person, even as the building rises to a much larger scale. Snyder said the facade should pick up on the scale of the room and individual home while extending across a tower of hundreds of units.

His example of 95 Madison offered a point of contrast. Snyder valued its facade details, including gargoyles and caryatids, because they meet the scale of a person. He said the challenge in new construction is to recover that kind of fine-grained expression using contemporary systems. Court Square Tower uses a curtain wall system manufactured in Southeast Asia, he said, but the design aims to give it a texture that responds to human scale.

This is a different kind of constraint from the structural and financial questions elsewhere in the panel. A tower may be shaped by a zoning envelope, a tight core, or the need to fit many homes on a site. Snyder’s argument is that those pressures do not remove the need to design for the scale of rooms and people. The building has to work simultaneously as a large urban object and as a collection of spaces people inhabit.

Development, Rosie Tilley said, is where design ambition, financing, and public policy have to resolve into a buildable project. A plan must fit the construction budget, work within the capital stack, accommodate government programs, and remain attractive to capital partners. “It’s all about maneuvering within constraints,” she said.

Those constraints shape both the homes and the people a project can serve. Tilley cited a 1.4 percent vacancy rate and a Manhattan median rent above $5,000 a month, and argued that every delivered home—deeply affordable or market rate—contributes to addressing the housing crisis. Her emphasis was on the range of incomes and household types a project serves, rather than income mix alone.

A senior living on a fixed income and a family with the same income may need different kinds of apartments. A senior and a young professional, by contrast, might both find a compact studio suitable. Tilley described the goal as versatile unit types, combined with underwriting and subsidy arrangements that reach a broader range of incomes. The design of shared spaces also matters: residents of efficient homes spend time outside them, so lounges, co-working rooms, and common kitchens need to welcome people across generations and household types.

Massing and floor plans are part of that calculation. Tilley said the development team works closely with its design partners to make compact, constructible units that still receive light and air. Those conditions affect whether a home feels good to live in; efficient layouts, meanwhile, can support revenue per square foot and a project’s financial viability. The design decision is also a capital decision.

Tilley described resilience as another requirement. Court Square in Long Island City had been seven years in the making. It began as a smaller rental building, grew after Charney acquired the neighboring site, then shifted to condominiums after the 421-a tax abatement lapsed. Tilley said an eight-foot-thick shear wall between what became two buildings—the “world’s largest party wall,” as she put it—helped preserve a fallback option as the project changed. The example shows how a project’s design and structure can be affected by changes in the conditions under which it can be financed.

Tax policy shapes those conditions too. Tilley said 485-x, the successor to 421-a, has not replicated the earlier program’s economics for many rental sites. In her account, costs can rise beyond the revenues a project can support, leaving developers to look for other ways to make the capital stack work. City-owned sites can help if land is available below market value. Partnerships with churches, schools, and other institutions can also unlock underused land while allowing the institution to retain a presence or sustain its organization.

Tilley argued that density can help address some of the cost and regulatory pressures, and pointed to city and state land, rezonings, and public requests for proposals as ways of making additional housing possible. Her account connected those choices to the land basis: a lower-cost site may help make a mixed-income project feasible. Institutional partnerships offer another route, particularly where churches or schools hold land with unused development capacity.

Tilley described Charney’s Gowanus portfolio as a way to give residents “passport access” across five buildings. She said the company’s five-building portfolio in the area includes 2,200 units, and described residents using pools, fitness facilities, work areas, and shared programming across the buildings. Digital tools help residents find affinity groups such as gardening and running clubs. A resident might meet a neighbor in their own building or at a basketball court in another one. She said the portfolio was intended to accommodate different stages of a renter’s life, from a first studio to a larger home for a family or a smaller home for empty nesters.

The point of the shared amenities, in Tilley’s account, was not simply to add features to individual buildings. Residents of efficient homes spend more time in common spaces and around the wider campus; amenities and connections between buildings can extend the places where daily life happens. She said residents responded to the opportunity to use the broader set of facilities, and described residents moving within the portfolio as their needs changed.

At 175 Third Street in Gowanus, Tilley described using a regular window grid and repeatable residential modules that can combine as studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom homes. She said that repetition supports constructability and cost efficiency while allowing the unit mix to vary. The project also includes a public park. Tilley said parks required by the Gowanus rezoning will link along the canal, with different landscape architects interpreting the guidelines in distinct ways.

The presentation slides displayed inconsistent unit totals for 175 Third Street, so the project’s scale is not resolved here. The detail Tilley emphasized was the combination of repeatable housing modules, a public park, and anchor retail. She said the repeated modules could make the building more efficient to construct while supporting different household types.

She also described how a project can secure additional floor area by undertaking public improvements. At Court Square, Charney undertook improvements to a nearby subway station; in Downtown Brooklyn, she said, the company was making accessibility upgrades to a station in exchange for additional floor area. These examples show how Tilley sees public infrastructure, private development, and housing capacity being negotiated together.

The panel’s exchange on drawing returned to the relationship between design tools and regulation. Nicole Torres asked how changing tools and regulations affect housing design. Toby Snyder said architects now work with more drawing tools and more constraints. A hand can still be the quickest way to develop an original idea, but projects are often designed within zoning envelopes while spreadsheets track floor area and deductions. He welcomed the book’s attention to drawing as a way to quiet those pressures and look closely at the spaces themselves. Plans, he said, remain central to how architects think, even as digital tools change how they work.

Tilley said the city had recently shown greater willingness to consider density, through large master plans, broader rezonings, and site-specific increases in floor area. She also described greater receptivity to cross-laminated timber and mass timber, approaches she said had not been used at meaningful scale in New York. Charney was looking at such an approach for a new project. Tilley cited the material’s appearance and lightness as potential advantages, while noting that a project still has to work with its foundations, regulations, and budget.

Modular construction drew a more qualified response. Tilley had seen volumetric modular construction at a Capsys site in the Navy Yard, where a crane could place a unit quickly. She also pointed to panelization and kit-of-parts approaches, describing possible advantages in quality control, speed, and reducing the amount of work done in the field. But the expected cost savings do not always appear in underwriting. She cited possible New York-specific constraints in building trades, permitting, bringing modules into the city, and working on constrained sites.

Snyder added a design constraint. New York projects often push zoning envelopes and rise to great heights; the buildings he had shown were mostly over 50 stories. In his view, modular construction may have to attach to other structural systems, complicating its use in buildings of that kind. Torres noted that modular works well in open fields. Snyder agreed that it could work in San Antonio, the questioner’s example, but argued that the pressures of filling a New York zoning envelope are different.

The exchange did not settle the question. Tilley said modular had not been tried enough, while acknowledging that apparent cost savings do not automatically translate into a viable project. Snyder’s concern was how modular systems fit the height and form of buildings New York is trying to build. Correa added that the city also has lower-density areas. Snyder agreed, but said communities in those areas can resist change, while dense parts of the city are more accustomed to construction.

That left a tension between where new housing may be possible and where residents accept change. Snyder described some lower-density neighborhoods as places where people see their homes and surroundings as having been right for decades and do not want them to change. He argued that the city may need to change those expectations. The panel did not resolve how density should be distributed or how neighborhood resistance should be overcome. Torres’s response was that design, financing, ownership models, and regulation all leave room for creative solutions, and that treating current limits as fixed risks a failure of imagination.

Torres, who said she lives in a small studio in Midtown Manhattan, asked how designers and developers might persuade people that compact living can be desirable, and whether there are lessons from places such as Japan. Felipe Correa answered that the case for a smaller home could be framed in terms of time rather than square footage. A central location may mean less commuting and less time spent on yard work; residents may not need to own every space they use if they can share it.

Correa connected that argument to the history and stigma of single-room occupancy housing. SROs, or single-room occupancy units with shared bathrooms, were common in New York into the 1980s and 1990s, he said. He described them as stigmatized as signs of blight or problematic behavior, while studios have been easier to market. Torres noted that many adults have shared apartments and bathrooms with people who were not relatives, even if they do not describe that arrangement as co-living. In her view, language and regulation shape whether shared living is understood as ordinary or undesirable.

The exchange left the design question open: how can a compact home provide access to the time, amenities, and shared spaces that make it work for its residents? Correa’s answer was to consider what people gain in centrality and time, rather than focusing only on the square footage they give up.