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UPD Students Sweep Awards in Affordable Housing Development Competition

All three winning teams in the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston’s annual Affordable Housing Development Competition featured members of the Urban Planning and Design Department. The competition, now in its 14th year, pairs graduate students from greater Boston with non-profit housing developers to create comprehensive affordable housing development proposals. Winners were announced at a ceremony at the Boston Society of Architects Space on April 29.

The $10,000 first prize went to AlmaViva, a scattered-site proposal in Lawrence, Mass., developed in partnership with Lawrence CommunityWorks. The AlmaViva team included Tim Czerwienski and Tom Skwierawski (both MUP’14) and Mitch Crowder, George Gard, Beth Lundell Garver and Karina Gilbert (all MAUD’14) as well as students from the Harvard Kennedy School, Boston University and MIT.

“Every week, for more than eight weeks, our group met to discuss Lawrence’s rich history of human empowerment,” said Garver. “I think our team’s collaborative and investigative process throughout this competition will live on in each of our future careers.”

The $6,000 second prize went to Xin-50, a 220-unit proposal developed with the Asian Community Development Corporation in Boston’s Chinatown. Ali Karimi (MArch ’16), Lukas Pauer (MAUD ’14), Jeenal Sawla (MUP ’14) and Weishun Xu (MArch ’15) were members of the Xin-50 team. Chris Colley (MUP’15) working with the Community Builders took third prize, $3,000, for Jackson Spring, a 168-unit mixed income development. The prize money for each winner is split equally between the teams and their development partners.

All of the UPD students in this year’s competition were members of Edward Marchant’s (lecturer in urban planning and design and adjunct lecturer in public policy at HKS) Affordable and Mixed-Income Housing Development, Finance, and Management course.