Roundtable: Accessible Cities

Rapid population growth and urbanization are driving climate change, housing shortages, health issues, inequality, and inequity. Yet cities are also uniquely positioned to address these crises. How can architects and planners, politicians and policy makers, developers and nonprofits reimagine the status quo to make cities more accessible? In a candid conversation, voices from across Perkins Eastman address issues at the intersection of affordability, mobility, and sustainability in their many facets—adaptive reuse, climate change, housing, lending practices, land-use patterns, zoning, and transportation infrastructure among them.

MODERATORS

Nasra Nimaga specializes in K-12 Education projects, and she is interested in the intersections of architecture, advocacy, and policy. Silvia Vercher Pons works on Arts + Culture and Planning + Urban Design projects, serves as a Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization board member, and teaches at Pratt Institute. Both Nimaga and Vercher Pons are fellows of the Urban Design Forum’s Global Exchange, a program focused on New York City’s housing crisis.

PANELISTS

Michael Friebele works across practice areas, contributing to civic, community health, cultural, and commercial projects. Dylan Glosecki focuses on residential and urban infrastructure projects and serves on the Seattle Planning Commission and the AIA Seattle board. Juan Guarin provides both sustainability support firmwide and performance-analysis tool training. Stephanie Kingsnorth leads Renovation + Historic Buildings and co-leads College + University practice areas. Brian O’Reilly is the West Coast residential practice area leader and a member of the firm’s Futures Council. Giaa Park works on projects in several practice areas, including Arts + Culture and K-12 Education.

ON ACCESSIBILITY

Silvia Vercher Pons: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 turns 35 this year. It has been transformative legislation, but we need to push beyond simple compliance to make our cities more accessible to all people. As Jean Ryan, president of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, recently said, “What is good for us is good for you.” So how do you infuse accessibility—in its broadest sense—into your design work?

Giaa Park: We need to look at how we support people’s everyday lives. The ground floor and how people access it is very important. It’s the area they most interact with, so how do we activate it? We need to understand context and people’s abilities. How do we engage them and mix their lives into architecture at various scales, while creating a clear design focal point and hierarchies? The first part is understanding context, which includes lifestyle and social and cultural backgrounds. The second part is how to create connections within that context at the human scale.

Michael Friebele: The first thing that comes to mind is Interboro’s book, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, which has been deeply influential to me. They think about the next level of things that inhibit accessibility such as defensive objects that might send a message—a surveillance camera, bollard, or landscape treatment. That those kinds of inhibitors can also be designed to make spaces accessible is a great opportunity. It builds on Giaa’s point about context. For example, Swope Health Village, a Perkins Eastman project in a historically redlined neighborhood in Kansas City, MO, is on a site designed in the midcentury and very much walled off à la Pruitt-Igoe. To make the site more accessible, we made its edges perform in a way that would welcome the community—such as through civic spaces.

Dylan Glosecki: We need to understand the point of view of others. For example, at a recent lecture, I heard someone talk about experiencing life from the point of view of a person who doesn’t drive. Because many of our cities have been designed around the automobile, there’s a lot of work to undo. If somebody can walk or roll into and around a building comfortably, then somebody who’s driving can also access it comfortably.

Nasra Nimaga: When does accessibility become a welcome driver of design that fully integrates people with disabilities—the most marginalized among us and the only minority group that any of us could join at any moment?

Stephanie Kingsnorth: We need to change our language, so it’s not only about code compliance, but also about making places for people. As Michael said, perception matters too. We have to take that into account as we design spaces to be accessible for all. It’s not just our perception. Sometimes, we tend to forget we are designing for the general population. We need to keep that in mind to make better spaces, better cities. I rail against the term “accessibility” because it can stymie us.

ADDRESSING THE HOUSING CRISIS

Nimaga: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index evaluates 173 cities based on stability, healthcare, education, culture, environment, and infrastructure. Not a single US city made the top 20 in 2024. Underscoring that point, current data shows we’re facing a shortage of some four million homes. What can we do to create housing that is affordable, inclusive, and abundant?

Brian O’Reilly: Removing barriers such as single-family zoning, which is both exclusionary and discriminatory, and legalizing the creation of missing middle housing are some of the first steps. Seattle is effectively doing this, as is Washington state. Eliminating parking requirements, which increase the cost of housing and put downward pressure on the supply, is another. Similarly, single⁠-⁠stair buildings, also known as point access blocks, improve efficiency and affordability for smaller apartment projects. There are all sorts of ways to incentivize housing creation.

Friebele: Our nonprofit client, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, provides $10,000 stipends to people who move to Tulsa. Our work on Western Supply, housing designed for fully remote workers, looked at offering fewer amenity spaces in favor of civic engagement through nonspatial benefits. A real estate investment trust program was proposed as one idea, and an on-site market will provide health and wellness resources to tenants and the greater community. It’s investing money otherwise spent on wine tasting rooms and makerspaces, which are easily found elsewhere in the city. Expanding on Brian’s point, it’s a project that explores ways to make housing more buildable. This experience and other precedents in the industry lead us to question how fundamental elements such as corridors are considered or why investments with little cultural return are made. Western Supply shows there is value in alternative forms of civic engagement.

“As we create new developments or rethink our cities, which can lead to gentrification, how do we make sure we improve, and not worsen, existing inequities?”

–NASRA NIMAGA

Senior Associate

Park: With COVID and new technology, our challenge has changed in places such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with offices being converted to residential uses. It’s not just about more housing. Depending on the location, the dynamics, and technology, it’s about how we can make inclusive, easily accessible, and vibrant communities.

Glosecki: I don’t believe we can decouple housing from the design of community. When we talk about housing, we need to think about needs and services that go along with it.

Guarin: A related topic is sustainability, which is not a priority for developers. But a lot of Passive House projects are affordable housing developments due to incentives. When developers ask why they should make it sustainable, why incur a cost for things, like Michael was saying, the key is incentives. It’s encouraging to tell people there’s no reason why affordable housing has to be lower quality than standard housing.

O’Reilly: I agree with Juan in spirit, but when we establish sustainability requirements, we should be certain we are not limiting housing creation. Developers say sustainability requirements prevent them from making their projects pencil out. The carbon footprint of someone living in a single-family home is dramatically higher than someone in an inefficient multifamily building in the city. Just living in a dense urban environment is a win from a sustainability perspective.

Kingsnorth: I’m going to switch to the adaptive reuse aspect. A lot of it is limited by zoning codes, building codes, historic preservation, and overlay zones, so there are reforms that need to happen. Right now, when you change the use, you have to be fully compliant with the code for new buildings, and that’s very hard with an existing building. But some cities and states are making changes. California’s AB 529, which passed in 2023, encourages adaptive reuse for residential projects. Renovation is not always more expensive than new construction. There needs to be more of a willingness to think differently about reuse.

“I don’t believe we can decouple housing from the design of community. When we talk about housing, we need to think about needs and services that go along with it.”

—DYLAN GLOSECKI

Senior Associate

INCENTIVIZING A HEALTHIER PLANET

Vercher Pons: There is nothing more sustainable than not building anything or reusing what we have, as Stephanie points outs, so how do you see this reality in your cities?

Guarin: Climate change is real, and every day we get further away from our carbon reduction target, so how can we design our projects to be future proof? Instead of just designing a building, we can turn it into a community hub that, in case of a power outage or natural catastrophe, the entire community can go there for refuge. Let’s make sure our buildings respond to the different kinds of shocks and stressors particular to their regions. Silvia and I have done many projects together and the first thing we ask is, “What’s the climate?” Is it experiencing a significant amount of heat stress or cold stress, and how does our design respond to those conditions? Some regions are going to get hotter over the next century, some regions colder. It’s our job to do the research and get the right data to understand how our project is going to perform now and in 100 years.

Vercher Pons: Recently, I spoke with a developer who builds affordable housing. I asked about the role of sustainability in his projects, and he answered: “We don’t contemplate sustainability because we lose money when implementing it.” How can we strike a balance within the people-planet-profit approach? And how can developers be inspired to create better spaces that not only enhance residents’ lives but also contribute positively to our cities?

“Instead of just designing a building, we can turn it into a community hub that, in case of a power outage or natural catastrophe, the entire community can go there for refuge.”

—JUAN GUARIN

Sustainability Specialist,
Senior Associate

O’Reilly: I’d like to raise a point that Juan made earlier, which is an economic conflict between sustainability and the financial performance of a building. Tenants pay their energy bills; it’s not folded into rent or paid by the building owner or operator. It’s very difficult to make an incentivized connection from one to the other. Building owners can’t say, “You’re going to have $100 in energy savings per month, so we’re just going to raise your rent $50.” Renters don’t care. They’re making choices based on the rent. If there were mechanisms that allowed building owners to capture those savings, that would incentivize them to put sustainable systems into their buildings. With the expertise of our sustainability team and connections to industry partners, we could drive some of that innovation.

Guarin: We need to be very smart and very creative when proposing something that might cost a little bit more—better performing windows or more insulation in the building envelope. We have to capture the savings from that strategy and try to offset that added cost somewhere else, and that’s why it’s critical for us to collaborate with innovative consultants.

Glosecki: I also want to add to what Juan brought up earlier about planning for building use 30, 40, 50 years into the future and considering climate change and increased weather events. It got me thinking about not only renovating buildings, but also renovating current urban land-use patterns and how we lay out our neighborhoods. Any new development in the middle of these largely single-family zones can become a community resource hub—a mixed-use building with a corner store or bodega in its base. If there is a natural disaster, households within walking or rolling distance of that location have access to food and drink in a conditioned space. It moves toward the 15-minute city idea.

SHAPING EQUITABLE CITIES

Nimaga: Let’s talk about mobility and navigating cities. As we create new developments or rethink our cities, which can lead to gentrification, how do we make sure we improve, and not worsen, existing inequities?

Glosecki: It’s not only about how do folks get from point A to point B, but also how do services get to people? If we can lay out our cities or adapt them to create more complete neighborhoods, so people can walk or roll to their services, then it’s not as important that they have bus access both here and there. A lot of US cities developed around a streetcar network. Car companies bought them out, and ripped out the tracks, but they didn’t rip out the development patterns. In Seattle, we still have a lot of small commercial centers throughout our single-family neighborhoods that have been forgotten, and we need to recapture them. This gets back to liberalizing our zoning, so we aren’t artificially constraining our supply, which increases costs and leads to gentrification and displacement.

O’Reilly: The amount of opportunity we have in our cities when it comes to single-family zoning is enormous. Legalizing duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes—neighborhood-scale multifamily units—could make a huge difference. The economic issues we’re grappling with in our cities for the creation of housing is a heady brew of interest rates and the cost of equity and construction. The dirty little secret is that if rents are not high, it’s difficult to make a project viable unless all other costs are pretty low. Finding ways to get those financials working and doing so with a connection to services is paramount.

Kingsnorth: Housing is not just one extreme, the single-family home, or the other, the high-rise. There are low-risers and mid-risers. What do we do in a downtown environment or a suburban environment?

Nimaga: Right, we don’t talk about alternatives enough. In New York, basement apartment legalization, for example, could supplement housing supply. According to the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, 10,000 to 38,000 potential basement apartments could be “brought into safe, legal use” in New York City without rezoning.

Guarin: I want to go back to what Dylan was saying about taking space back from the cars and giving it to the people. We’re going to give you more space to walk, to sit at a café on the street, and we’re going to take one lane from the streets and make it pedestrian. During COVID, it was fascinating to see cities start to take space from cars and give it to the people, who then started taking ownership of it—outdoor restaurants, playgrounds, and other activities in spaces that used to belong to cars.

Friebele: We’re going through that experimentation now in Minneapolis. Most of the major arterials are going under a lane diet. And, to Dylan’s point, there’s something overlooked in many cities, especially Midwestern cities, where the streetcar lines historically have created a number of the divides in our communities. If we were able to really think about what they mean, there’s a lot of [ameliorative] potential there. And it goes back to political capital. It’s where working with nonprofits, as well as public-private partnerships, is going to help. Our work with Swope as well as the Kaiser foundation allows us the opportunity to experiment and create proof of concept. We’ve started to bring similar things to our private developers and their feedback is, “It’s great, but lenders won’t understand it.” I’d like to see those efforts expanded. Nasra, when we met over the Dream Charter School in East Harlem, which is part of a mixed-use complex of affordable housing and community services, it was incredibly inspirational. It’s another model with untraditional uses coming together and a client who is rooted in the community.

Kingsnorth: Michael hit on a key aspect because we keep talking politics, but it’s the lenders. They’re not seeing the vision of developers with a passion to do the right thing, so it might not be an issue of political capital as much as it is capital.

O’Reilly: Our St. Luke’s project in Seattle is a great example of what Michael is describing—unusual uses combined. It’s an Episcopal church with a large land asset in one of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods. They had aging facilities, and they decided to create as much affordable housing as they could. They teamed up with a market-rate housing developer to create a fully affordable building with 84 units, now under construction, and a market-rate building that also contains the church sanctuary. While trying to find a funding partner, questions came up: Is this a good idea? Has it been done before? We put together a package of examples and were able to provide comps because that’s what the lenders look at, right?

Nimaga: Lenders need precedent for buy-in.

Kingsnorth: It’s a catch-22, but people are trying and that should be celebrated. The more we spread the word about these kinds of ideas collectively as a firm, the more we’ll be able to change the mindsets of developers and lenders.

Nimaga: And our own mindsets too. As a profession, we sometimes design with other architects in mind. Remembering why we practice puts people at the center of our work.

Moderators’ Note: As shapers of the built environment, we navigate both the impacts of our projects and our responsibility in stewarding change. The Narrative’s new roundtable series establishes a practice-wide space to engage in meaningful discussion of issues that influence our work, our communities, and our own lives. In this first installment, our colleagues tackle challenges and recommend implementable actions we can take toward the equitable and sustainable cities we collectively aspire to create. N