Despite the Dire Housing Picture, the South Bronx Sees a Way Forward.

Good news is hard to come by on the housing front. The eviction moratorium has expired. Experts now predict skyrocketing home prices may rise indefinitely. According to a Pew study, more American adults today consider affordable housing a major worry in their communities than crime, drugs or Covid-19.

And no wonder. The lack of affordable housing is inseparable from racial and other disparities in health, education, public safety and economic opportunity. New York, by one estimate, is now the nation’s most segregated state. Not coincidentally, its deficit of nearly 650,000 affordable housing units is surpassed only by California’s.

Then, of course, there was the unfathomable week in January when a fire killed 12 people in an overcrowded Philadelphia rowhouse owned by the beleaguered public housing authority there. Another 17 died a few days later when a space heater ignited at Twin Parks North West, a privately owned, 1970s-era, Section 8 high-rise in the South Bronx.

NIMBY resistance, more states are undoing single family zoning rules and legalizing so-called accessory dwelling units or ADUs, meaning basement apartments, backyard cottages and converted garages. Last month, New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, floated ADU legislation in her State of the State address.

And New York City’s former mayor, Bill de Blasio, who for years focused his neighborhood rezoning efforts to incentivize the construction of more subsidized housing only on low-income, majority-minority neighborhoods, during his last days in office finally pushed through rezonings in a couple of largely white, wealthier districts. That has opened the door for his successor, Eric Adams, to do more of the same. As Casey Berkovitz of the Century Foundation recently wrote, the groundwork is emerging for a “more equitable future.”

In the wake of the fires, I toured a couple of affordable housing projects that opened a year or two ago in the South Bronx not far from Twin Parks. I had waited to see them. Writing about architecture before buildings are up and running is a guessing game. A couple of years isn’t long in the life of a housing development, but tenants can at least have moved in and be asked how things are going.

development team. The nonprofit Jewish Association Serving the Aging now operates the property and provides in-house mental health, legal and other services. Andrew Bernheimer was the architect.

Today, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which has been seeding some excellent affordable housing projects on city-donated property, has precious few large parcels left in its inventory. What remains are mostly tiny and tricky lots like 1490, which faces onto a subway viaduct and is partly taken up by a rock escarpment.

Fortunately, Bernheimer is a gifted, resourceful architect, familiar with the obstacle course of affordable development, including challenging sites.

From the street — and from passing subway cars on the elevated tracks — the building he and his colleagues at the Brooklyn-based Bernheimer Architecture have designed is striking. Shallow, recessed panels of pale-yellowish bricks create a basket weave pattern across a facade of dark enameled and matte gray bricks. The recesses do the work of costlier ornaments and cast animating shadows. Double-glazed windows shut out the bedlam from the trains.