This research project supports Sunset Park’s cooperative legacy in the context of the Community Land Act, an urgently needed package of laws that gives housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other nonprofit land organizations the tools to develop and preserve large, permanent housing, as well as community and commercial spaces and other critical needs.
Building Tenant Power with BHIP is a collaborative project envisioned to build tenant power through popular knowledge, neighbor coalitions, and organizing tools. It has been developed by MS Design and Urban Ecologies Class of 2015 in collaboration with the Bushwick Housing Independence Project (BHIP) and the Housing Justice
The Voces Ciudadanas’ Interim Sunset Park Library Campaign is a community-led project involving multiple community and grassroots organizations in Sunset Park. The campaign seeks to keep for the community the space currently used by the Interim Public Library as the new library opens in the Fall of 2023. This project has been developed by students from the MS Design and Urban Ecologies program in partnership with Voces Ciudadanas, a grassroots organization founded to create an alternative space for neighbors to come together and engage in dialogue about gentrification and other issues affecting Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
This research-based design project is being developed by MS Design and Urban Ecologies students in collaboration with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. The project seeks to envision innovative organizing and planning tools to help underserved and immigrant communities build capacity as they start their recovery efforts. The tools will become part of LISC’s community-planning process ensuring equity and inclusion which remains at the center of the organization’s planning and collective impact process.
Women, Care, and Housing: Envisioning New Housing Cooperative Models for Sunset Park’s Immigrant Communities initiated in the fall of 2018 as part of Design and Urban Ecologies Studio 1. Students worked closely with Beyond Care, a worker cooperative led by immigrant women providing childcare services in Brooklyn, which became a partner during the previous semester. As part of this project, a number of workshops, working sessions, and discussions around housing cooperatives and Community Land Trusts were organized in collaboration with Beyond Care members to work toward the design of a new model of housing cooperative for their families.
United for Housing is a collaborative project developed by first-year students from the MS Design and Urban Ecologies program, the Community Development Finance Lab, and United Families of Sunset Park, a group of over 15 families who are organizing to establish a housing cooperative in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. The project involves the co-production of educational and organizing tools to advance the efforts of the group, the design of methodologies to identify potential properties for the project in the neighborhood, and the development of scenarios to create a cooperative housing considering local assets and available public programs and funds.
