State, City Officials Emphasize Importance of Design in Addressing Housing Issues at GSD Talk

Officials from across the country said that their experience working in local government underscored the importance of design in improving and innovating cities at a talk hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The talk, which kicked off the fifth annual Mayors’ Institute of City Design Just City Mayoral Fellowship, brought together officials from Maryland, Boston, and Florida to discuss the importance of design methods to address housing issues in cities.

Pensacola mayor Darcy C. Reeves said that “engaging with not only design professionals in our community, but university-based design” assisted in developing ideas for his city to implement.

“Design thinking lends itself to really pushing boundaries and to testing,” Reeves said. “It’s innovative. The people who gravitate towards it are innovators, and so we’ve benefited from that.”

Tiffany Chu, Chief of Staff to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07, added she has found that designers bring unique perspectives to challenges facing cities.

“There’s just a visual language that designers are so good at that city hall is traditionally not good at,” she said.

Maryland secretary of the Department of Housing and Community Development Jacob R. Day — a previous MICD fellow — said he was compelled to join the program to use design to address racial disparities in housing.

“I’ve got a love for and appreciation of this work and what design can do, both in terms of influencing public policy, as well as shaping our communities and shaping the way we do work,” Day said. “It was also an opportunity to tie this work to the most meaningful thing that our society is facing: how do we repair damage done in this country through the lens of race?”

Reeves, who also previously participated in MICD, said the program helped him understand how to engage and work with his city’s residents.

“I really feel like the job of mayors is to know what you know — and just as valuable, know what you don’t know,” he said.

Day said that his position has taught him that “there was nothing else that affected all of my resident’s lives more than the place where they lay their head.”

“From day one, we have been up focusing on racial justice in housing and in place as, really, a core function of what we were tasked with as a state housing agency,” he added, highlighting predatory rental situations and rising housing costs as two unresolved issues.

Chu said that she is focused on establishing clear lines of communication with Boston residents in her work on the squares and streets initiative, which she said is meant to rezone “the whole city of Boston.”

“When you tell residents, ‘Oh, I’m going to rezone the whole city,’ that scares them,” Chu said. “We have tried to take it step by step – one bite of the elephant at a time.”

Reeves agreed, ending the discussion by saying that leadership is “losing the battle of messaging” effectively about housing to the community.

“If I had a rub of a genie lamp, that’s what it would be — us, the same way we understand red, yellow, and green, that we would understand when we talked about affordable housing, attainable housing in this country,” he added.

—Staff writer Nishka N. Patel can be reached at nishka.patel@thecrimson.com.