New York City isa place where one in three children live in poverty, where 57,000 citizens sleep in homeless shelters, and where 3.6 million workers barely make the federal minimum wage of $18,000 per year. Increasingly, middle- and low-income citizens find it close to impossible to secure a home, often thwarted byspiraling debt and the encroachment of real-estate speculation. Van Alen Institute, in partnership with Miguel Robles-Duran and Gabriela Rendón, founders of Cohabitation Strategies and professors at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, will host a workshop to bring together researchers, designers, and activists on the forefront of strategizing ways to reverse these cycles of debt and displacement. Through games, short presentations, and discussions, we will build an understanding of the processes at work, in order to analyze the role that government, nonprofit organizations, designers, and cultural organizations can play in addressing this crisis of affordability.

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