Although the ever more-pertinent issue of housing continues to manifest more and more both in academia (there are three housing studios at Yale just this semester), and the media (affordable housing discussed but rarely addressed), the conversation is detrimentally partitioned: politicians speak to developers, developers speak to investors, architects speak to competition boards, teachers speak to students, students try to be relevant, etc. In pursuit of actionable understanding, Paprika XXIII brings these often contradictory yet necessarily supportive ideas into uncommon proximity through a diverse array of conversations. This issue consists of a series of brief interviews with thinkers and practitioners who engage housing from wildly different vantages— be they conceptual, material, financial, political, or otherwise:

Housing must be a human right, but still, housing is a commodity (Angotti) / The affordable housing crisis produces the homelessness crisis and the Right to Shelter is not the Right to Housing (Staudenmeier) / You can’t say ‘public housing’ in public without using it in the past tense. Today, private real estate governs, often violently (Martin) / Style is the great equalizer, and sometimes, we need a new image (Plater-Zyberk) / Housing should be a social process related to the collective urban surrounding, not manifest out of our individual dreams (Fezer).

These perspectives illuminate, undermine, bolster, repeat, and contradict one another. Together, they are in service of each other, and in turn, in service of those seeking to do something about the housing crisis.