+ Framlab. Awarded Honorable Mention in ReThinking Homeless Shelter 2015
As the world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history, cities are densifying at a tremendous rate. In metropolises like New York City, the land is scarce and the rents are at a record high.
As a direct-result of these soaring numbers, more and more people are unable to afford a place to live and find themselves homeless. Over the last few years, homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the Fall of 2015, over 59 000 people were spending their night at homeless shelters in the city. Simultaneously, thousands of unsheltered homeless people sleep on the streets, in the subway system, and in other public spaces.
Although almost every square foot of space in NYC has been claimed and utilized, there still manages to exist an abundant amount of “vertical lots” sitting idle. These are the blank sidewalls of buildings that emerges and disappears as new developments come and go. HoMED is a project proposal to utilize this leftover square footage, by using a flexible framework that already exist in the city – scaffolding, along with pre-fab housing units. A hexagon-shaped module is designed to connect structurally to the scaffolding structure, pack densely, and create a second, active layer of these empty wall. In aggregate this forms cluster of suspended micro-neighborhoods of shelters for the city’s least fortunate.
