Blog by Jamal Gauthier: “The crisis of affordable public housing can be felt across America on a large scale. Many poor and impoverished families that reside in public housing projects are consistently unable to pay rent for their dwellings while dealing with a host of other social complications that make living in public housing even more difficult. Creating affordable public housing involves the use of innovative processes that reduce construction cost and maximize livable square footage so that rents can remain affordable. Through the rising popularity of nontraditional approaches to innovation, many organizations tasked with addressing these difficult housing challenges are adopting such methods to uncover previously unthought of solutions.
The concept of crowdsourcing especially is paving the way for federal agencies (such as HUD), nonprofits, and private housing companies alike to gain new perspectives and approaches to complex public housing topics from unlikely and/or underutilized sources. Crowdsourcing proponents and stakeholders hope to add fresh ideas and new insights to the shared pool of public knowledge, augmenting innovation and productivity in the current public housing landscape.
The federal government could particularly benefit from these nontraditional forms of innovation by implementing these practices into standard government processes. The struggling affordable public housing system in America, for example, points to a glaring flaw in standard government process that makes applying the best ideas for real-world implementation by the government virtually impossible….(More)”.