By Francesca Birks, Travis Bostick, Gabo Halili, Anna Ishii, Barbara Mikrut, Emily Sperber
New York’s housing crisis is not only about supply. It is also the result of a development system oriented toward yield, speed, and commercial value rather than household stability. As households diversify and family caregiving, multigenerational living, and economic precarity become more common, New York City’s housing stock grows more misaligned with residents’ needs. By 2040, the older adult population will grow 25%.(1) Approximately 37% of New Yorkers are immigrants(2) or relying on intergenerational networks for child care, adult children support elders, and families pool resources.
Yet the housing supply doesn’t reflect these realities. Nearly 40%(3) of rental units are studios or one-bedrooms, contributing to severe overcrowding rates more than twice the national average.(4) 11% of New York City households live in overcrowded conditions,(5) 20-30% in immigrant-majority neighborhoods.(6) Latinx households account for 20% of overcrowded units, Asian/Pacific Islanders 15%, Blacks 13%, and Whites 9%. New York City also faces undercrowding: many older adults occupy homes that are too large or physically inaccessible with no affordable alternatives. 9% of NYC households have appropriately sized homes, 25% occupy overcrowded dwellings, and 66% are undercrowded.(7)
International precedent demonstrates that rightsizing is achievable. Singapore’s intentional intergenerational planning, Switzerland’s cooperative housing model, and London’s social investment fund present approaches coordinating policy, finance, and design to reflect demographic needs. NYC’s challenge isn’t only producing housing, but producing housing typologies to reflect New Yorkers. The following four levers are critical:
- Unit Size & Design: Flexible, accessible typologies, multi-bedroom, multi-suite, modular, universally designed homes supporting aging in place and multigenerational living.
- Tenure & Governance Innovation: Community land trusts, limited-equity cooperatives, shared-equity ownership, and co-housing to prevent outside speculative markets.
- Finance Models: New capital sources, pension funds, community bonds, mission-driven investment, supporting permanent affordability at scale, and patient capital.
- Demographic Alignment: Production reflecting actual population trends, including older adult growth, immigrant household patterns, and evolving family structures.
How might we design and govern housing that fits the evolving needs, income levels, relationships, and resource-sharing patterns of diverse New Yorkers? A broader understanding and application of rightsizing would ensure that NYC’s housing system supports stability, caregiving, and community resilience for generations to come.
Designing for Intergenerational Living in Singapore
Singapore’s Three-Generation (3Gen) flats represent a national model to redesign public housing around intergenerational care. The program is a systemwide typology introduced into a housing ecosystem where 87% of residents live in public flats.(8) To understand the impact of these spaces, we spoke with Junko Tamura, an Associate Professor at Meiji University and former Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore specializing in spatial analysis, and her student Choy Rui Zhi, a Singaporean native. When Singapore’s national Housing & Development Board (HDB) adds a new unit type, it shapes the everyday lives of an entire country. The 3Gen flat was created to support aging parents, ease caregiving burdens on younger families, and better match Singapore’s shifting demographic realities.
The HDB, led the design and rollout of this typology, and the Ministry of National Development supported the initiative through broader policy direction around aging-in-place. Unlike cities where reforms require years of legislative debate or community advocacy, Singapore’s centralized model, specifically the Build-To-Order (BTO) system, allowed the 3Gen flats to be introduced relatively quickly. Pressing needs of families informed demand. As more seniors lived alone with limited access to support, concerns grew about social isolation and rising eldercare costs. Younger households struggled to balance work, childcare, and caregiving, uncovering the reality that traditional nuclear-family flats no longer met the needs of changing households.
The 3Gen flat reflects the major demographic shifts occurring in Singapore. The population is aging rapidly,(9) with declining fertility and increasing longevity.(10) Existing housing stock, primarily built when extended families commonly lived together, no longer fit contemporary life. Tamura observes that while the HDB landscape often appears homogenous, the interiors reflect the diverse individual lifestyles of the residents. Smaller units and tighter layouts have made multigenerational living stressful. Policymakers began rethinking how design could help families maintain caregiving relationships while reducing conflict and overcrowding.
Introduced in 2013, the 3Gen flat includes four bedrooms, two full primary suites, and expanded shared spaces.(11) A core design principle was balancing closeness and privacy. Choy Rui Zhi highlights a spatial tension here: even within a shared home, the older generation requires their own distinct autonomy, which these layouts attempt to provide by separating the younger couples’ suite from the parents’ suite. Shared living and dining areas were enlarged to support daily routines, shared meals, and the mobility needs of elders.
Governance considerations were also part of the redesign. Eligibility rules reflect Singapore’s legally defined family structure, which is centered on heterosexual marriage. This encourages a government-structured ideal Singaporean identity through homeownership, which Tamura identifies as a key success factor for HDB. This system treats housing as a predictable investment, often tied to the Central Provident Fund (CPF), with many residents aiming for a $1M SGD retirement benchmark. However, this security comes with a trade-off, as residents grant the government significant control over their demographic environment.
The program has been extremely popular, with many launches receiving more applicants than available units, reflecting sustained market demand.(12) Families report reduced elder isolation, improved childcare support, and increased emotional resilience. Seniors can age in place longer, which reduces pressure on institutional care. These outcomes reinforce Singapore’s goals around aging and family support.
The housing model is not without challenges. Eligibility rules exclude many caregiving households, including same-sex parents and LGBTQ+ couples, due to Singapore’s definition of family. Siblings caring for one another or “chosen family” networks also do not qualify. Same-sex couples must wait until age 35 to enter the public housing market. Some families prefer separate homes despite improved layouts. Choy Rui Zhi points out that many standard HDB flats are already large enough for multigenerational living, suggesting that the 3Gen label acts as much as a policy incentive as a design necessity.
The success of the model depends heavily on Singapore’s centralized planning capacity and high proportion of public housing, making it difficult for cities with fragmented governance or limited public control over land to replicate this approach. Even with these limitations, the 3Gen flat remains a notable example of how design and policy can work together to support intergenerational living at scale.
Cooperative Housing in Zürich
In Zürich, housing is considered essential social infrastructure rather than a financial asset. The principle of Gemeinnützig shapes a political and cultural framework that welcomes cooperative housing. Housing in Zürich stabilizes communities, supports daily life, and resists market volatility. As a result, cooperatives, member-owned, democratically governed, and committed to long-term affordability, have become a durable and trusted component of Zürich’s housing system for decades.
As housing pressure intensified in the 1990s, Zürich’s public support for non-speculative development expanded, prompting the city to promote dense, mixed-use housing on public land. The Kalkbreite Cooperative emerged from a set of key policies: long-term municipal land leases, mandatory architectural competitions, and zoning mechanisms that allow shared and communal spaces. Together, these tools redirect value away from speculation and toward housing as infrastructure rather than a commodity.
Kalkbreite originated as a grassroots collective, organizing public workshops to involve residents throughout planning and governance. Designed by Müller Sigrist Architekten, the building integrates shared courtyards, green roofs, and an internal “rue intérieure” that supports daily social life. The city supported the development through a ninety-five-year land lease and funding for predevelopment studies, while governance is managed by the cooperative Genossenschaft Kalkbreite. Residents participate through working groups that manage operations, resolve conflicts, and care for shared spaces.
The project reflects decades of political support, policy reform, and shifting public attitudes toward housing. In Zürich, cooperatives often act as testing grounds for innovations overlooked by the private market. Cluster apartments; wohnjoker, or residential joker rooms with en-suite bathrooms that allow residents to expand their living space for up to three years; and robust communal programs are all ideas that have since influenced for-profit developers, demonstrating how nonprofit models can influence broader housing practices.(13) Kalkbreite demonstrates the ambition and adaptability of Zürich’s cooperative housing model. Its successor, the Zollhaus Cooperative, extends these principles, underscoring the importance of cultural consensus.(14) In a nation of renters, where nearly a quarter of Swiss housing is nonprofit, cooperatives have been able to prioritize shared space, distribute responsibility, and remove housing from speculative pressures while maintaining broad public support.
Kalkbreite is an example of a housing model directly reflecting a community’s needs. The development successfully integrates residential, commercial, and cultural programming in an amenity-rich environment while preserving affordability through a government-imposed cost-rent calculation that ties rent to building maintenance and operation, rather than profit.(15) This removes units from the speculative market and makes them attainable to diverse households. Intentional cooperative rules and regulations necessitate tenant selection that mirrors Zürich’s broader demographic makeup, with applications selected based on diversity of age, economic status, occupation, and background. Membership fees support maintenance, utilities, and shared reserves, while a cooperative security fund contributes to a multi-coop emergency rent support system.
Despite its success, Zürich faces challenges familiar to New York City: extremely low vacancy rates (0.07%),(16) high land prices, and limited opportunities for densification. For cooperatives like Kalkbreite, the primary constraint is scale. As developable sites within the city diminish and public RFP processes grow more complex, project timelines stretch dramatically. Kalkbreite took eight years from inception to ribbon-cutting. In the context of an active housing crisis, such timelines hinder the rapid delivery of affordable housing.
New York City has its own history of cooperatives and limited-equity housing, for example through the Mitchell-Lama program. Their scale has eroded, and few contemporary projects meaningfully decommodify land. Zürich demonstrates that cooperative housing can succeed when it is supported by public land policy, financing, governance structures, and shared cultural expectations. Adopting a single project would be insufficient in New York City. Instead, we need to shift our understanding of housing as an investment vehicle to vital social infrastructure.
Homes for Londoners Impact Fund
Homes for Londoners Impact Fund(17) illustrates how a global city can reframe its housing crisis as a systems problem: one rooted not only in affordability, but in the misalignment between household needs, housing typologies, financing structures, and governance.
Over the past decade London experienced two reinforcing crises.(18) First, a wave of housing production that failed to match the needs of residents. Private developers largely delivered smaller, market-driven units while thousands of families on social housing waiting lists required larger, accessible homes capable of supporting long-term stability. London was building housing, but often not the housing its residents needed.
The second crisis was a sharp decline in housing delivery. Escalating construction costs, tighter lending conditions, and new safety regulations introduced after the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, including the Building Safety Act 2022(19) and Fire Safety Act 2021(20), significantly increased compliance and retrofit costs across the housing sector while extending development timelines.
At the same time, housing associations and local councils responsible for delivering social housing faced rising maintenance obligations and costly building retrofits. Rent caps constrained operating revenues, while traditional mixed-tenure cross-subsidy models, where affordable housing was financed through market-rate development, became increasingly difficult to sustain. As a result, London was not only producing housing misaligned with household needs; it was increasingly struggling to produce housing at all.(21)
In response, public agencies and industry partners(22) began exploring a new approach.(23) The Greater London Authority, London Councils, and partners including Opportunity London,(24) New London Architecture, and private-sector companies such as Arup and JLL began convening around the concept of a citywide investment platform capable of aggregating housing pipelines across boroughs and attracting long-term institutional capital.
The Homes for Londoners Impact Fund pools development opportunities, standardizes investment terms, and creates a sufficiently large pipeline of projects to attract pension funds and other long-horizon investors. Unlike speculative real estate capital, institutional investors typically seek stable, inflation-linked returns over investment horizons of thirty to forty years. This return profile aligns closely with the lifecycle of affordable housing and opens the possibility of financing housing as long-term social infrastructure rather than short-term development projects.
While the fund has not yet been fully capitalized, the initiative reflects an important shift in how housing delivery is being approached. By aggregating projects across boroughs and coordinating governance, the model aims to create the scale and predictability required for institutional capital to participate in affordable housing delivery.
Challenges remain. Regulatory constraints continue to shape project feasibility, retrofit costs remain high across aging building stock, and governance fragmentation across borough, city, and national levels still slows coordination. Yet these conditions also reveal why new delivery mechanisms are needed. The London Impact Fund reflects a broader reframing: treating affordable housing not as a series of projects, but as long-term civic infrastructure requiring coordinated governance and patient capital.
Big Swings for New York City
New York City can reframe housing as civic infrastructure by aligning capital, design standards, governance, and demographic needs — elements often separated by speculative development. A program like Homes Fit for New Yorkers, a proposed pilot near the Interborough Express (IBX) corridor, a transit project that will connect currently underserved areas of Brooklyn and Queens in Brooklyn and Queens, could demonstrate how housing policy can prioritize long-term community stability and demographic change. Access to public and mission-driven capital from a New York City Housing Impact Fund that combines public and private investment, would be conditional on outcomes: family-sized and adaptable units; long-term affordability; and housing typologies that support care, continuity, and household stability. It would:
- Create a New York City Housing Impact Fund: Combine public and mission-driven private capital to finance projects aligned with long-term public goals.
- Tie funding to clear outcomes: Require family-sized and adaptable units, long-term affordability, and housing typologies that support care, continuity, and household stability.
- Incorporate neighborhood priorities early to shape unit mix, flexible layouts, shared spaces, and long-term neighborhood needs before projects are defined. This will also ensure predictability, and accountability for delivery partners.
- Design the model to scale, demonstrating how housing systems can shift away from speculation toward long-term, equitable, community-centered investment.
Mission-driven, public and private capital from a New York City Housing Impact Fund would be conditional on outcomes: family-sized and adaptable units; long-term affordability; and housing typologies that support care, continuity, and household stability. Neighborhood needs would inform housing standards and RFPs before projects are defined – shaping unit mix, flexibility, shared spaces, and long-term priorities while maintaining clear rules, predictability, and accountability for delivery partners.
For architects, this creates room to design for lived reality rather than layouts optimized for speculative returns. For public agencies, it aligns funding and approvals with enduring public value and long-term community stability. For community partners, it shifts engagement upstream, from reaction to authorship.
Homes Fit For New Yorkers starts with the IBX corridor and is designed to scale, demonstrating how housing systems can be re-aligned away from speculation and toward long-term investment in equitable, community-centered, multigenerational housing. By testing the Homes Fit for New Yorkers framework along the IBX corridor, the city can develop and refine mechanisms that align public land control, patient capital, and community-informed design standards with long-term affordability outcomes. The lessons from this pilot are intended to inform a replicable model that can be applied to future large-scale urban transformation projects, including transit expansions, civic infrastructure investments, and major redevelopment initiatives, where public action has the potential to reshape land values and housing markets. In these contexts, proactively reserving public land, financing tools, and governance structures for permanently affordable, right-sized housing can ensure that infrastructure investment strengthens existing communities rather than displacing them.
Fellows
Francesca Birks
Travis Bostick
Gabo Halili
Anna Ishii
Barbara Mikrut
Emily Sperber
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