Breaking New Ground: Designing Affordable Housing for the Coachella Valley Workforce
Register/Submit Deadline: Friday, Dec 19, 201411:18 PMEDT
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Breaking New Ground
Description:
Breaking New Ground is an international design and ideas competition addressing the urgen affordable housing needs for farmworker and service worker families in the Coachella Valley. Efforts to improve living conditions suffers from a lack of funding and coordination. Going beyond desing, the competition seeks to envision new precedents, mechanisms, and policies for affordable housing implemenation and development, with implications for California and the nation.
Background:
Economics and Demographics
Located in southeastern California, the Coachella Valley is home to one of the nation’s most vital agricultural economies, generating nearly $4 billion in economic activity annually. This economy relies on both a permanent and seasonal workforce to harvest crops and work in tourism-related service sector jobs. However, due to a chronic shortage of affordable housing for this workforce, the region is facing an unprecedented crisis in which thousands of families and individuals are forced to live in unhealthful, substandard conditions. Poverty to this degree is found just minutes away from the affluence of resort communities like Palm Springs, Palm Desert, and Rancho Mirage. Despite playing central roles in the production of regional and national food supplies, the average worker’s annual income hovers between $15,000 and $30,000, falling within the US Department of Health and Human Services poverty thresholds for families.
Living Conditions
Many workers and their families live in vehicles, on streets, in parking lots and even outdoors in makeshift camps in the surrounding hills. They have little or no access to healthcare, transportation, and other supportive social services. This community endures conditions defined by lack of access to adequate heat, ventilation, hot water, sanitation, cooking facilities, and healthy food. In essence, they are living in the midst of constant crisis, with no resources to escape systemic poverty. Without an alternative, many end up living in some of the 100+ unpermitted mobile home parks estimated to be in the Coachella Valley. Often located on tribal grounds and exempt from regulation, the trailers are sometimes held together by nothing more than plywood and duct tape, while residents dodge wild dogs, rats, open sewers and exposed wires. Public agency efforts to improve and formalize these parks suffers from a lack of funding and critical mass.
Response
To address this urgent need, The California Endowment is sponsoring Breaking New Ground, an international design competition that seeks implementable architectural and policy solutions to re-envision the near-term housing future for this population. Through the power of compelling design and innovative thinking the competition seeks to fundamentally change the lives of agricultural and service workers, uplifting these communities and transforming the landscape of the Coachella Valley for the betterment of all.
Competition Divisions and Eligibility
Open Division
The goal of the Open Division is to produce an implementable proposal for a housing community that can and will be realized.
Eligibility
Individuals, firms, or teams from around the world comprised of architects and professionals from allied fields. Teams may also include students and faculty from architecture and other disciplines.
Submission Requirements
Participants are required to submit highly-developed, holistic architectural proposals consisting of a descriptive narrative, a financial model, regulatory framework, social services framework, and a conceptual design.
Student Division
The goal of the Student Division is to produce comprehensive proposals that address the full scope of competition issues with a greater emphasis on creativity and less emphasis on short-term implementation.
Eligibility
The Student Division is open to high school or college students and faculty from around the world who are currently registered in an educational institution. Faculty may participate only as part of a student-led team.
Submission Requirements
Participants in the Student Division are required to submit two digital boards and a two-page written narrative of their proposals.
Registration Opens: October 2014
Prizes and awards: $350,000
A total of $350,000 USD in prize money will be awarded to winning entries, finalists, and awards of merit.
Competition details and requirements are subject to change until registration opens.
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