However, today’s re-development strategies sometimes produce similar results. Lower income populations are still shuffled aside to make way for higher income residents, the historical character of established neighborhoods is whitewashed away by au courant sensibilities, and the real needs of existing residents fall by the wayside in the developers’ desire to make old neighborhoods new.

Of course, it is no easy task to create new developments that truly integrate what has come before, what exists today, and what one hopes for the future. Taking on this challenge raises tough questions for developers and designers: If the past history of a neighborhood is to be considered, whose past should be most acknowledged? If a new development should represent the needs of a diverse community, whose voices should take precedence? If a new development is a harbinger of the future, whose vision of that future should drive its design?

In each of the affordable housing developments highlighted in this newsletter, Pyatok Architects tried to put this goal into practice. Our vision was to fuse together the needs of incoming residents (seniors; lower income families seeking health care, childcare, and job training; working-class singles), the desires of the existing communities, and the visions of community developers into places that all of these groups can claim as a key part of “their neighborhood.”

Pyatok Architects, like all placemakers, hopes that each of these additions to these neighborhoods are such a proper fit that they will be embraced in the present as if they had always been there and will be valued in the future as an embodiment of the spirit of these communities. Making such landmarks is the kind of sustainability we strive to create.