The latest NOMA magazine arrived in the mail today. Our team worked hard putting this together. I hope the members and friends of NOMA enjoy this look back at last year’s conference. Please send your feedback to magazin [at] noma.net.

If you aren’t a member, think about joining. However, you can still view the PDF version on the NOMA website.

Updated 03/26/2013 2:30pm. Note: listings in the directory are self-reported and continuosly updated. Check the website for current totals.

I do not have scientific evidence on the reason for the decrease. I know in 2009 NCARB changed the exam. This prompted a lot of people to finish so they wouldn’t have to enter a new tunnel of examinations. Maybe some of those people would have procrastinated longer so there wouldn’t have been the bump. Of course the economy has hit architects hard over the last three years with the decline in construction activity.

Just for kicks, I looked at the number of lawyers passing the bar exam**. The numbers have increased. In fact, many people think there is an oversupply and now have actual data to substantiate their opinion.

Back to the architects, congratulations to the 33 African American architects who overcame the hurdle of getting licensed in 2012. Now go out there and help someone else get there too.

**By the way, I can find this information much easier than I can find the same information for architects. A search quickly took me to the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The organization publishes annual statistics in their newsletter.

I was invited to expand a previously written post found here about NOMA and it’s importance on the organization’s 40th anniversary. This article was written for the American Planning Association (APA) Planning and the Black Community Division’s (PBCD) Winter newsletter which focused on social equity.

You can download the entire newsletter here.

It’s January; that means that a lot of students who received college acceptance letters are now working on financial aid applications. Several news outlets are covering the topic of low and moderate-income students’ experience getting in to and succeeding in college. I recieved a full scholarship for my undergraduate education. Without that scholarship, I would have been working or applying every year for grants and loans to pay for school. I had the chance to focus on my studies without the burden of worrying about how I was going to pay for it.

NPR’s article, Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids, tells the story from the perspective of the colleges. The interviewer talks to Havard recruiters about their efforts to get low-income students to apply and enroll at the university. One of the obstacles is getting students, who don’t have mentors or other connections with people who have attended Ivy League schools, to look at these schools beyond the price tag. Without personal connections, many students do not consider this option.

The NY Times, For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall, profiles four young women from Texas. The students struggled to translate their high school academic success to the college arena. Relationships with friends or lack thereof, money, and moral support all became obstacles for the students.

One of the reasons low and moderate income students falter in college is moral support. I was fortunate to make friends and have professors who took an interest in my well being. Many of those people remain friends and mentors.

Blogger Harriet writes about her experience in Black, Poor, and Woman in Higher Education: What I Learned From Graduate School. She shares her lessons, things she probably wished someone would have told her.

This issue is important because communities need these students to become successful citizens. These will be the future parents, business owners, and civic leaders. Communities can only be as strong as their residents. It is a waste if talented low and moderate-income students aren’t given the adequate resources to fulfill their potential.

A recent story on NPR’s Morning Edition reported on care features that make it easier for older people to remain in the drivers seat long into thier life. The article also characterized the features, like push buttons and rear cameras, as helping to make driving safer for everyone not just the elderly. Yes, making driving safer as our population ages is important. However, safe, walkable communities with good public transit would also be a viable solution to help people age-in-place and still enjoy a high quality of life.

The expert interviewed also said: “we plan for retirement — and we should plan to stop driving in the same way.”

Are you or a family member facing not being able to drive?

Flickr photo by epSos.de

An article was recently published in Atlantic Cities showing that over time cyclists and pedestrians spend more at local businesses because they visit the businesses more frequently than drivers. The data and graphs supports effort to make communities more pedestrian and bike friendly.

This quote about Portland, Oregon really struck me as I think about my suburban community:

The “young and fearless,” as Clifton calls them, are already biking there. These are the riders who will happily dodge cars and thunderstorms without much dedicated infrastructure. Now the city needs to coax what Clifton calls the “interested but concerned.” These are the people who will require a higher level of accommodation – separated bike lanes, actual bike parking – and therefore some tougher conversations about what that might mean for scarce resources and roadway (and for the drivers who might be impacted by reallocating them).

In my town, because there is no infrastructure and the idea is so foreign to most people, “a higher level of accommodation” will be needed from the beginning. A sidewalk is in process of being constructed on a main road here between two schools. Pedestrians were already using the road despite having to walk on a tiny should or in a ditch. Hopefully this is the beginning of a larger strategy to make the road pedestrian and bike friendly.

Are you seeing efforts to make your community more friendly for bikes and pedestrians?

I am experiencing this first hand. My mom used to be able to ride a bus from my grandmother’s house to the nearby cities. Now 50 years later, because of privatization of transportation through easy access to individual automobiles and disinvestment in transit, there is no public transportation for tens of miles from the house. It would be great to have a bus line within walking or biking distance not only for employees but for kids to get around. Folks who can not afford a car or families with only one car and multiple workers could be helped to get to jobs and neighborhood services.

In addition to the paper the website has an interactive map that shows share of jobs in neighborhoods with public transit. I was really spoiled in San Francisco: I had a ten minute train ride to work.

What has your experience been using transit to get to work?

Flickr photo by torbakhopper

I ambitiously agreed to present in three seminars. Fortunately, in my limited time, they were all on the same day, and, luckily, I had short breaks between each. I know some may wonder why go through the trouble but I always like to share my work. Also, conferences are a great way to get the word out about something that is successful locally so others can use it.

First up was the session on Engaging Youth in Design. I worked with two collaborators, Shirl Buss and Prescott Reavis. We have been working for the past four years with an elementary school in San Francisco that is adjacent to a public housing site that is underging redevelopment. Our job has been to engage the youth to teach them about architecture and planning and how it affects their lives and also to get their input on the development taking place right outside their classroom windows. We gave an overview of what we have taught for the past four years.

In addition to just presenting the information, we saw this as an opportunity to do something unorthodox. We actually brought a hands on craft activity for the attendees to do during the session. We are architects and at heart I think we love to create. We gave the attendees the task of creating a bas relief about their journey as an architect.

Second, I joined Mark Matel to present the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship. It was great to see a room full of young people interested in community design. As I have written before, I feel architects of color need to be involved in underserved communities especially where there are large populations of people of color.

Third, I presented my personal journey as part of Riding the Vortex XI, a session discussing the journeys of African-American women in architecture. This session has been presented at several conferences over the last 5 years. It was great to report that the number of licensed African-American women architects has doubled in the last ten years. I, as #251, was sitting on stage with #14 (Kathryn Prigmore). We were joined by the two other originators of the session, Barbara Laurie and Kathy Dixon, and Detroiter,Tiffany Brown.

I love going to the conference to connect with my NOMA family, share war stories, see new cities, learn way to be a better architect and see architecture through new and interesting lenses. You can check out the Twitter feed and Facebook page for other stories and photos from the event.

Take aways: 5 thoughts
1. Because there is no bold national advocacy on climate change the Overton Window is being shifted. -Alex Steffen, WorldChanging

2. “A pack of cities is racing away from everybody else in terms of their ability to attract and retain an educated workforce,” said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It is a sobering trend for cities left behind.” -as quoted by Rob Bennett, Portland Sustainability Institute

3. Affordable housing policy of the last 65 years was drive until you qualify. -Dr. Richard Jackson, UCLA

4. TV took 13 years to get 50 million subscribers. Facebook took 12 months. Twitter took 9 months. -Riggs Kubiak, Honest Buildings, Inc

5. (my paraphrasing) The comet theory as metaphor for leadership: even a comet has stragglers at the end of it’s tail. They may be slow to catch up but they eventually follow the head. -Scott Poole, University of Tennessee

I could expand on any of theses thoughts but for now they will just marinate. do any of them resonate with you?

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