Cover image: Timber Ridge Apartments. Image courtesy of Ink Built Architecture
Join Living Future’s Affordable Housing Summit and connect with the innovative minds building a better world. For years, we’ve showcased groundbreaking project teams, and this year is no exception. Discover how they’re redefining affordable housing by radically decarbonizing, using healthier and biobased products, and championing universal design for a more equitable future. You’ll get updates from pilot projects like Timber Ridge (Zero Energy) and Kelsey Civic Center (“disability-forward”), plus insights from our Safer Materials Shift participants.
This year’s Summit is more than just a conference; it’s a vital gathering designed to harness our collective strength for a regenerative vision of housing. We’ll bring together the wider Living Future network, leaders from the national Affordable Housing sector, and other innovators. In a post-pandemic world, reconnecting is crucial. This Summit will explore housing models that build stronger, more connected communities, reversing trends of isolation. You’ll also discover how industry leaders are fostering deeper collaboration within their teams and organizations to achieve shared goals. The Summit is sponsored by Studio G Architects.
Day One
Keynote – Jacqueline Patterson
Jacqueline Patterson from the Shirley Chisholm Legacy Project will lead us off and discuss how environmental issues, poverty, racial discrimination, and gender inequality must be tackled intersectionally. In 2024, Patterson was named one of Time Magazine’s Women of the Year for her work over several decades to promote the well-being of black communities and climate justice. She helmed the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program for more than 10 years where she published numerous reports and articles, including Coal Blooded, a report detailing the health impacts of coal-fired power plants on nearby low-income communities and communities of color.
Navigating Challenging Times in Affordable Housing Development
Join us for a discussion among three of the nation’s largest affordable housing developers: Enterprise Community Partners, Mercy Housing, and Local Initiatives Support Corporation. We will have an open format for these developers to talk about how they are adapting to a shifting landscape in funding and how they are working to keep their environmental initiatives intact and moving forward over the next several years as we approach 2030.
The Future of Biobased Affordable Housing
Day 1 will wrap up with two leaders in biobased building design: Jacob Deva Racusin, Co-Founder of New Frameworks, and Judith Sheine of the TallWood Design Institute at the University of Oregon. Racusin will discuss his vast experience designing and teaching natural building construction. Sheine will share her work on mass timber construction and its possibilities for affordable housing. We will end this session with a special showing of Green Buffalo, a video showing how the Lower Sioux Indian Community is building homes out of hemp, promoting jobs and cutting emissions in their local community.
Day Two
A Vision for Stronger Communities
Kaarin Knudson, Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, will kick off Day 2 of our Summit with her inspiring vision for simultaneously creating housing and implementing aggressive climate action. Knudson is an architect, educator, and elected official, as well as founder of the public interest project, Better Housing Together.
Updates from the Shift to Safer Materials: Transforming Affordable Housing Specifications
Living Future has been working with ten affordable housing developers and architects for close to a year on transforming their specifications to include healthier products. We will share this work so far and hear from two of these participants on how they have implemented this overhaul within their own organizations and what they have found thus far in their research. We will build on the knowledge presented in these presentations and help the audience discover ways to begin building their own knowledge and processes for healthier materials.
Reimagining Housing for Connected Communities
This session will discuss how the current state of the built environment contributes to our societal issues with disconnection and how we can reimagine how we build our communities to expand access to diverse, affordable housing options while fostering more connected, sustainable communities.
Closing Keynote – Grace Kim
Grace Kim, Founder of Schemata Design, will close our Summit. Kim is an architect and an internationally recognized expert in co-housing, the “antidote to isolation.” Kim will challenge us to think about what can happen when we design homes with community at the forefront.
Don’t miss the chance to learn from these inspiring speakers—secure your spot today by registering here!
