The Cost of Home

As part of our ongoing affordable housing exhibit, The Cost of Home, City Center is bringing Christine Gaspar from Center for Urban Pedagogy down from New York on October 27 for an experiment in applying CUP’s zoning and affordable housing toolkits to New Orleans. Each toolkit was designed within a New York City context, and are intended to be used by neighborhood groups and community based-organizations to help inform and organize communities to advocate on their own behalves. Gaspar will walk us through the toolkits as used and we’ll be experimenting with a very early stage version that our working group has begun to develop for New Orleans’ specific challenges.

We’re viewing this as a first step towards potentially developing a New Orleans specific toolkit, one that relates to and supports the tremendous work of GNOHA/HousingNOLA, as well as reflecting the limitations of zoning and models of affordable housing provision in our city. This workshop is an opportunity to do some thinking and testing about what elements of CUP’s work would be useful as a tool for you all and your various constituencies so we can focus on combining and tweaking, rather than reinventing the wheel.

Because we’ll be working hands on with a scaled up version that incorporates elements of CUP’s toolkits, we will be capping participation at 30 individuals, so please RSVP here https://goo.gl/forms/fKEr2wow2qhb6oqr2. The workshop will begin at 5 pm, and run until about 8 pm, with food provided.