Developing Affordable Housing Ecosystems World Wide
By:David A. Smith [Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.] Now we know that 87 Linden Street, where Binland Lee died in the April 28 fire, was way over-occupied, because that was in the unstated but manifest interest of both landlord and residents. As I’ve observed elsewhere, in any [...]
By:David A. Smith [Continued from yesterday's Part 1.] Yesterday’s post on the tragic death of Binland Lee, in her attic room in an overcrowded student rental, dealt with the fire’s facts – and if that were all to the story, it would simply be a tragic incident. But everything is connected to everything [...]
By:David A. Smith Tragedy exposes an ecosystem’s weaknesses. A rowdy college party, a lit cigarette, an overcrowded student house, a remote and small-scale landlord, informal subdivisions and excess occupancy, and a building inspection system that gives the illusion of enforcement. Combine them and a young woman is dead. Binland Lee, BU senior … [...]
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.] By:David A. Smith To collapse an overloaded system is the easiest thing in the world. Much harder is to build a better one anew. September, 2008; Searching for survivors after the Cliffside collapse, el-Doweiqa, Cairo The last time Egypt had a revolution (1952), it ended [...]
By:David A. Smith Unsound systems eventually collapse. Should we have seen it coming? That’s true whether the systems are political, financial, legal, or physical. We talk about systemic breakdown as if it were metaphoric, but for the residents of al-Me-adessa Street, collapse is no metaphor at all, as revealed in a well-intentioned [...]
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