Ben Metcalf
In Rome, I will be undertaking a comparative study of social housing in European contexts with a goal of informing policy solutions to California’s ongoing housing-affordability crisis. I plan to investigate models that can be applied to a next generation of California housing development, seeking a middle way between traditional low-income affordable rental housing and private-sector-driven models that would be responsive to local planning contexts and design goals. This work is intended to inform courses I will be teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the following year; it will also support research that I will be providing to state policy makers to inform a State of California initiative currently underway to design a new social-housing program.