Great Lakes Building ReUse

Creative housing redevelopment to enable revitalization and cultivate livable neighborhoods.

As many industrial cities experience a growing supply of abandoned and vacant housing, creative efforts to both restore buildings and reinvigorate neighborhoods are being implemented to invite people back to the urban communities.  Several models have been successful at transforming blighted structures and creating living and work spaces for artists, first time home owners, and small businesses.

Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses. Rick Lowe is founder of Project Row Houses in Houston, TX.  As an artist, he has participated in exhibits in major galleries worldwide, worked as a guest artist on community projects around the country, and won many awards.  Project Row Houses (PRH) was established in 1993 on a site of 22 abandoned shotgun houses to connect the work of artirts with the revitalization of the community.  It was inspired by the work of African-American artist Dr. John Biggers who celebrated the social significance of the shotgun house community in his paintings.  After a decade of successfully generating programs that combine arts and cultural education, historic preservation, and community development, the future of the Third Ward is threatened by gentrificiation.  To preserve and protect the irreplaceable historic and cultural legacy of our community, PRH spawned a sister organization, the Row House Community Development Corporation.

Aaron Bartley, People United for Sustainable Housing. Aaron Bartley is founder of PUSH Buffalo, which organizes residents of Buffalo’s West Side to achieve greater community control.  Through action oriented campaigns, PUSH mobilizes residents for direct engagement with irresponsible absentee landlords, government agencies and major corporations.  PUSH also advocates for comprehensive reform of housing policy and redevelops West Side housing for occupancy by low-income Buffalonians through the PUSH Community Housing Co-op.

Aaron, a Harvard Law School graduate returned to his native Buffalo after leading the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, which won $10 million annual wage and benefits gains for 2,000 low-income service workers at Harvard, and the Boston Justice for Janitors strike in 2002 as an Attorney and Organizer for SEIU Local 615.

Rachael Williams. Rachael Keri Williams is a single mother of a toddler.    She and her son live on Buffalo’s west side with their dog, Oskar.  Rachael was diagnosed with a severe chronic illness and is recovering from a head injury she received when violently assaulted in 2004.  Faced with the need to raise her child with few resources and extremely limited opportunity, she began researching the problems facing the city and when she was well enough started initiating conversations with her neighbors, home care staff, community organizations, and national leaders in affordable housing, new urbanism, and cooperative development.
The group is designing the process of their first community participatory development
project. They are trying to build a network of support  to develop an limited-equity cohousing cooperative in the city of BUFFALO, and establish an ecoschool, that will build community capacity in cooperative housing management, cooperative learning, participatory development, ecodesign, green building, natural building, environmental education, ecosystem regeneration, and social entrepreneurship.