Near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a new apartment development doesn’t just stand out from its neighbors, it literally stands over them. One Sullivan Place, designed by RKTB Architects sits—and sprawls atop—the corner of Sullivan Place and Washington Avenue in Crown Heights, a Tetris-shaped, 12-story tower of affordable apartments that cantilevers over adjoining buildings.
Architect Peter Bafitis, AIA, says that while the unique shape complicated and added significant cost to the build-out, which was finished last April, a different kind of math made the building pencil out. By securing more space above other buildings to expand to a 52-unit project, more market-rate apartments could cross-subsidize the affordable options. “It illustrates the weird and innovative way you have to start thinking about designing in New York City,” says Bafitis. “You have to create more available land.”
In a crowded city, volume has always come at a premium. Land and construction costs continue to rise. But architects have found that rethinking the precious resource of land and space—adding community areas to projects, improving access to more people, fusing different functions, even cantilevering apartments over their neighbors—can have a significant impact on urban livability. “When I went to architecture school, we were really thinking within our lot lines,” says Adam Lubinsky, principal at WXY. “There wasn’t enough that was spilling out into the urban realm. Today, you’re seeing architects more focused on data, and you’re seeing more architects thinking about urban context.”

Affordability continues to worsen; the city will be half a million units short by 2032, and with a vacancy rate of less than 2%, options and mobility have dwindled. Factor in a pedestrian safety crisis, increasingly strained transit systems, longer commutes, and widening income disparity, and it makes sense for architects to look well beyond aesthetics. News that a community land trust—a nascent but growing type of communal property ownership—acquired a 21-unit apartment building in Brooklyn last March underscores the need for new ways of approaching development. It was the first time such a group had purchased a private building. “We’re really excited to expand this model,” East New York Community Land Trust Campaigns Director Hannah Anousheh told Bisnow.
The definition of urban livability can be slippery. But as the focus of architectural work has evolved from design excellence to elevating social connection and community, according to Dan McPhee, executive director of the Urban Design Forum, “people want that conversation around commerce, finance, development, and public policy.”

For architects seeking a building block for connection and culture, the public library makes a great foundation. That’s the theory behind The Eliza, a 14-story development that opened last June, which grafts affordable housing atop a local branch library. Designed by Fogarty Finger and sheathed in taupe-gray bricks and terra-cotta panels to reflect the neighborhood’s Art Deco façades, The Eliza truly reflects the community on its bottom two floors, which contain a library designed by Andrew Berman Architect, a universal Pre-K center, a STEM Center, and space for job training, classes, and cultural activities.
The idea of mixed-use, retail, and residential projects, or vertical villages, isn’t revolutionary. What stands out about The Eliza is the way it was assembled to foster the non-commercial aspects of community that often remain sorely undernourished in 100% affordable housing developments. Consider a day in the life of a family living there: The kids can be dropped off at child care, parents can check out community programs and job training through midday, and teenagers can spend afternoons doing homework among the stacks. At night, parents, kids, and neighbors can congregate amid the upper-level amenities—a gym, a spacious laundry room with views of the Hudson River, and rooftop gardens.


These library-focused projects are poised to expand, with a new development taking place on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. But other iterations of the idea are being attempted, especially as a shortage of development sites turns attention to government-owned or brownfield industrial space. A former chocolate syrup factory in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for example, is being redeveloped into a 174-unit affordable housing project with 39,000 square feet of light industrial space for small businesses on the ground floor. Designed by Think! Architecture and Design, the project is a joint venture by The Bridge, a mental health and housing nonprofit, Megagroup, a private, for-profit affordable housing developer and builder, and the Greenpoint Manufacturing & Design Center.


The Eliza resulted from the New York Public Library and the city seeing the potential in developing on library prop- erty, rethinking how that space could work, and pursuing the larger vision despite neighborhood pushback and lawsuits. Now, Upper Manhattan has 175 apartments, renting for $500 to $1,600 a month, near a striking new library. Chris Fogarty, AIA, whose firm Fogarty Finger designed the building, says in addition to incorporating so many everyday amenities, his team also spent significant time elevating the material choice and unit layouts.“Affordable housing is still living in a little bit of a Dark Age,” he says. “We hope that when we lay out an apartment, it doesn’t feel like it’s just ticking the box.”
At a time when the vital concerns of affordability and accessibility seem to trump all, projects that also consider livability are that much more important. For Justin Cruz, chief operating office of the Cruz Companies, a Boston-based firm that focuses on affordable housing, it’s imperative that projects don’t feel cheap. It’s a commitment the firm takes seriously: the Cruz Companies will be a com- mercial tenant in its under-construction Michael E. Haynes Arms development in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, which will eventually include retail, office, a café, community recreation space, and roughly 100 affordable apartments.


Part of doing that was pulling back on unit quantity and focusing more on quality. “New York is also having this push to maximize space,” says Cruz. (It’s true; new one-bedroom apartments are about 40 square feet smaller than they were a decade ago.) “So it’s really a balancing act. We’d rather not do a 150-unit box. Maybe we do something in, say, the 80-unit range. Not impossible, but it enables us to do a deal, but not sacrifice the things that feel important to us.”
That philosophy can also work on much larger scales. In East Harlem, the Sendero Verde development, which finished in April, is a block-sized, multibuilding project incorporating 709 units and a 34-story tower. Celebrated for its green, sustainable design—it’s the tallest such structure to be certified Passive House—its success, according to architect Blake Middleton, AIA, of Handel Architects, results just as much from its engagement with the community and streetscape.
Once an open lot that included neighborhood gardens, Sendero Verde still seeks to tend to the community’s growth. Meandering paths lined in green—the project’s name means “green path”—include a grand staircase that pulls pedestrians off Park Avenue, creating interaction and gathering spaces. The massing of the three buildings was arranged to maximize sunlight for those taking a stroll. A courtyard, redesigned with the input of the neighborhood Acacia Network, features a school, a separate youth and senior center, a stage, and demarcated meditative, gardening, and play areas.
Just as new residents build on the human capital of cities, these new housing developments utilize their budgets and footprints to add new neighborhood infrastructure to the community. Many architects see their role as advocating for this infrastructure, whether by changing housing policy and pushing for zoning and building code reform, like Mayor Eric Adams’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal, or by wading deeper into the intersection of policy and its social impacts.
By viewing schools, and the equity of the public education system, as part of social infrastructure, WXY ’s Lubinsky utilized his architectural training to help rethink policies for District 15, which includes South Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Park Slope and Sunset Park. Schools and housing remain intimately intertwined: good school districts boost property values and development, while some residents who can’t afford to move from poor-performing schools feel like prisoners of their kids’ limited educational options.

Beginning six years ago, Lubinsky and his colleagues created a series of proposals to decrease inequity in the diverse student body. The district’s middle schools were the second most socioeconomically segregated when WXY started with this work, which included robust community engagement sessions. The end result advocated reforms such as removing admissions screens, adding multilingual classrooms, and instituting a priority lottery for low-income students. A recently released five-year study of the program found that segregation has decreased and test scores have improved.“On a basic level, we’re an office that’s really focused on the built environment,” says Lubinsky, “and we see schools as integral to the shape and nature of neighborhoods and cities.”
Lubinsky connects these issues most directly to something so many architects, planners, and developers have endeavored to improve: a sense of a divided city. Schools, like so many other factors, don’t just impact property values and rental rates, and alter development decisions, they can also form enclaves of inequity. Eliminating these enclaves may—like the green accents on the paths winding through Sendero Verde—be the true connective thread in all this work. Any nod towards building community space, improving interaction, and making the complex and crowded lives of New Yorkers more livable, brings people together.
“I love that architects—but also engineers, lawyers, and other technical experts—are embracing a kind of new entrepreneurial spirit,” says McPhee of Urban Design Forum. “How can we help our neighbors, and do it in partnership?”

PATRICK SISSON (“A Lifestyle Adjustment”), a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, writes about architecture, development, urbanism, technology, and the forces that shape our cities. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review, The Baffler, and Fast Company.