Planning: CIVIC-PG Track B: Placekeeping: a Co-designed Model for Intergenerational Co-housing and Coalition Building in a University-Adjacent Community

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The US housing crisis has severely impacted underserved communities of color. Rising rents and home prices put homeownership further out of reach. In 2021, 74% of white Americans owned a home, compared with 43% of Black Americans. Due to systemic racism, these disparities have persisted over decades. Existing housing stock needs reinvestment to meet the demands of an aging population. These challenges have been exacerbated due to residual impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and surging prices of food, gas, and other necessities. This project addresses these issues through the co-development of Second Story Collective (2SC), a novel multi-generational co-housing model that centers the arts to cohere diverse communities. This homesharing strategy aims to preserve homeownership for long-term residents, create affordable opportunities for new homebuyers, and reduce student housing costs. By utilizing a co-design process informed by community input as well as multi-modal data, the 2SC co-housing model will address the need for affordable housing and aging-in-place options while increasing access to services, reducing isolation, and building social cohesion. Findings from this project will contribute to knowledge in the fields of comprehensive urban community development, creative placemaking/placekeeping, and participatory research and design. The main objective of this project is to develop, implement, and evaluate the 2SC model for intergenerational co-housing as an anti-displacement and aging-in-place strategy. The transdisciplinary team will work with an established cross-sector partner network to address urgent housing needs in the West Philadelphia Promise Zone neighborhood of Mantua, a rapidly gentrifying community that is also one of the nation’s most impoverished. The project will utilize a Community-led Participatory Action Research design driven by the Community Capitals Framework, examining community development efforts from a systems perspective that centers community assets rather than deficits. Stage 1 will co-design and develop the 2SC co-housing model for Village Square on Haverford, a new multi-use development in Mantua. Using heterogenous data, we will create an asset map of the relevant resources and develop a plan for establishing and coalescing the pilot community. In Stage 2, the project team will implement the 2SC pilot community and collect data including surveys, interviews, and focus groups to evaluate the success of the pilot. The 2SC model has the potential to be implemented in similar communities throughout the US, and results from this pilot will serve as a model for equitable development through community-driven anti-displacement and co-housing solutions, particularly for historically marginalized Black communities.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.