Living Libraries

An Affordable Housing Opportunity Takes Root

New York City's branch libraries play a vital role in the life of the city, acculturating new generations of immigrants, supplementing children's education beyond school walls, and offering new media to those who would not otherwise have access to technology.

Yet even as they perpetually struggle to fund their collections and maintain aging facilities, many New York City libraries literally sit on an untapped resource: millions of square feet of valuable real estate that they are legally allowed to develop under the city's zoning code but lack the financing to construct.

In partnership with the Charles H. Revson Foundation and New York City's three library systems, the Pratt Center's Living Libraries project is helping the libraries reconstruct and redesign branches while simultaneously using the sites to bring another urgently needed resource to city neighborhoods: new affordable housing, to be built above the library facilities. Through financial analysis, architectural renderings, and collaborative planning the Pratt Center is turning a vision and opportunity into a practical, replicable model.

Living Libraries is working with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and a new private funders' collaborative to create financing packages for affordable housing development and library branch reconstruction and to seek developers for a first round of sites.