Sponsored By

Zachary Mannheimer

Founder & CEO, Alquist 3D and Atlas Community Studios

After a road-trip from NYC to 22 cities around the country, Zachary chose and settled in Des Moines in 2007 founding the Des Moines Social Club, an arts and educational non-profit. Since opening its doors in 2009, DMSC hosted over 5000 events for over 1,000,000 patrons. In 2020, Zachary founded Atlas Community Studios, a team helping rural communities plan for growth. Working in over 20 states, Atlas works to revitalize communities through economic, cultural, and entrepreneurial concepts. Zachary is also CEO at Alquist 3D, a construction company that uses concrete 3D printers to create homes, buildings, and other structures aimed at dropping the cost of, and solving the housing crisis. Zachary serves on the boards of Iowa Public Radio and Iowa Rural Development Council. He lives in Iowa City with his wife Sarah, and their three kids Mira, Benjamin and Fiona. He is an opinion contributor to The Hill and his work has been written about in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Politico, The Atlantic and dozens of community publications. Zachary and Alquist 3D were featured in the xChats event, Can 3D Printers Fill In the Gap?, in October 2021.

Pre-Conference Workshop

The Small Community of Tomorrow: How to Attract and Retain New Residents, Create Innovative Amenities, Build 3D Printed Housing, and Find the Funding to Pay for It

with Libby Crimmings, President, and Alex Holland, Vice President of Altas Community Studios

Tuesday, May 24th, 12:30pm – 2:15pm

Pre-Conference Session

How 3D Printed Homes can Revitalize the American Economy

Following the successful delivery of the first 3D printed, owner-occupied home in the world, Alquist 3D explains how 3D technology can change the economic and social landscapes of underserved communities. Whether it’s a shortage of child care, broadband, quality of life amenities, education, or medical services, solving the affordable housing crisis is paramount to revitalizing our towns. Mannheimer’s presentation offers solutions for the community of tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 24th, 2:30pm – 3:15pm

Curtis J. Moody, FAIA

Founder, Moody Nolan

Award-winning architectural designer Curtis J. Moody, FAIA has had a prosperous 48-year career. Moody Nolan is the largest African American architectural firm in the country and the firm’s designs have received more than 350 awards, more than any other minority architectural firm in the United States.

While founding his firm in 1982, Curtis J. Moody, FAIA decided to build it on a foundation of diversity of thought. Curtis has continuously challenged what once was the status quo and has created a corporate environment that is both inclusive and equitable. Moody Nolan has grown to 330 employees and 12 offices across the nation. The firm’s designs have won more than 350 design citations, including 55 from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and 45 from the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA). Moody Nolan continues to garner national attention by promoting “diversity by design” and was selected as the 2021 AIA National Architecture Firm Award recipient, the highest firm honor achieved through the American Institute of Architects.

With a passion for uplifting underserved communities, Curtis has made great strides revitalizing neglected neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio and throughout the country.  In 2019, Moody Nolan gifted a mortgage-free single-family home, The Legacy House, to a single mother of three. The purpose of the Legacy House was to give someone a second chance by removing the largest obstacle to homeownership: securing a mortgage. He hopes that this gift will spark others in the community to use their talents to help others and plans to design a mortgage-free home in each of the cities Moody Nolan operates.

Kickoff Session

Affordable Housing: Why the Legacy House?

Curtis Moody, FAIA, will give an architect’s perspective on the affordable housing challenge. Within the context of Moody Nolan’s Legacy House project, Curtis will discuss the impact architects can have on communities in-need, as well as the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the industry.

Tuesday, May 24th, 3:30pm – 5pm

Anna Mackay

Founder, Sister City

Anna has spent her career innovating and field-testing concepts of social impact in real estate. She led the first Regulation A crowd-investing effort for new construction in the United States ($1.5M, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell) and raised a tranche of crowd-invested equity from everyday Oregonians for a homelessness project in just 68 hours ($300,000, Jolene’s First Cousin). She has pioneered new models of development that emphasize non-displacement and affordable retail (Rocket Empire Machine). Her buildings achieve affordability and community buy-in through the utilization of crowdinvesting, internally-subsidized financial models, and bold public art.

Anna founded Sister City in 2020. Every Sister City project reevaluates standard development practice to emphasize a just balance of equity—social, environmental, and financial. Her current projects include the Annex, Portland’s first affordable housing project to utilize cross-laminated timber and the development of replicable workforce housing units called Shortstack alongside Jessy Ledesma of HomeWork Development. Shortstack is a replicable, mass timber, “missing middle” housing solution that will initially pilot 70 units on four sites in Portland, Oregon. It will welcome its first tenants in 2023.

Morning Session

Rethink the Paradigm//Rebuild the Process

Aren’t we all ready for more authentic, Meaningful Places?  In her keynote, Anna Mackay, the principal, and founder of Sister City, outlines how the entire practice of developing real estate can be shifted toward radical equity and inclusion.

Wednesday, May 25th, 9am – 10am

Workshop

A Crash Course in Impact: A Practical Approach to Developing Meaningful Places

Wednesday, May 25th, 10:30am – 12:15pm

Abhijeet Mohapatra

Co-Founder & CTO, Symbium

Abhijeet Mohapatra is a Co-Founder and the CTO of Symbium, the Computational Law company. Symbium is disrupting how the public interacts with zoning laws, helping them plan their residential construction projects through intuitive web applications to ensure compliance with zoning laws and a streamlined permitting experience. As an immigrant student in the US, he experienced first hand the challenges and the complexity of navigating regulations. This inspired him to build software applications which democratize the access of data and regulations for the public. He co-invented Dynamic Logic Programming, which enables compact representation of complex regulations in a manner that is amenable to automation, and holds multiple patents related to efficient analysis of data and policies. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

Virtual xChats

Computational Law and the Future of Planning

Rules and regulations in planning are tedious to read and can be even harder to understand. From residents to developers, the challenges in translating these regulations and ordinances into scalable action to build housing are numerous. Out in California, the founders of Symbium have democratized and automated understanding the complexities of planning regulations into a free, transformative resource for the entire state of California.

In 2020 they were the winner of the Ivory Prize in Housing Affordability and since then have continued to expand their work, helping to make the planning process easier and streamlined. Their portal is currently being utilized in cities like San Jose to expand housing supply.

Symbium’s CTO and co-founder Abhijeet Mohapatra will join HousingX virtually for a conversation with HousingForward board chair Vaughn Poller and VCHR associate director Mel Jones.

Wednesday, May 25th, 1:15pm – 2pm

Theo Henderson

Activist and Podcaster

Theo Henderson is currently the Activist-In-Residence at UCLA Luskin Institute on and Democracy. He has created a podcast titled We the Unhoused while living houseless in a park in Los Angeles, California. His vision is to provide a platform centered on the displaced, uplifting Unhoused voices against reductive housed and mainstream media coverage.

In addition to this major undertaking, Theo has organized Unhoused voter registration, comics, poems and an Unhoused memorial service. He has also partnered with local mutual aid groups such as Street Watch, Polo Pantry, Los Angeles Community Action Network and many others. Theo has penned op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and Knock LA. He has been featured in Curbed, CNN, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The Heat, Spectrum News, Teen Vogue, and Enspire Magazine.

Closing Session

We The Unhoused

Wednesday, May 25th, 3:30pm – 5pm

Theo Henderson’s experiences, like being on a housing waitlist for over 6 years, made him realize there’s an untold story of what cleaning sweeps, gentrification, and police interactions are like for those like him. Without housing, people lack stability and security, jeopardizing basic human rights. This session explores why he believes that homelessness is the civil rights movement of our time.

At HousingX, Mr. Henderson will speak about the importance of how we understand housing insecurity and housing solutions. His presentation draws attention to the structural causes of poverty, including racism and reminds us of the social and policy shifts needed to address such issues. Using his own experience of becoming unhoused, and the stories of other unhoused people, he will explain why a major problem with the narrative around housing issues is that it has been — and remains — guided by people who are housed.

Attendees will be presented with points that may make them consider how we are handling the unhoused in short-term solutions, rather than investing in long-term problem-solving conversations. Henderson uses a mix of audio clips and photographs throughout his presentation to demonstrate concepts of hostile architecture and policies that harm unhoused families, all while we are quick to avoid our own humanitarian crisis driven by NIMBYism.  

A college-educated former school teacher, Theo Henderson, who found himself unhoused during the Great Recession, has not allowed the condition of becoming unhoused to end his teaching. Instead, through his advocacy and podcast, he has created new pedagogies that reflect the condition of being unhoused. People have the power to make change, but they need to be armed with the necessary knowledge to do so. Through this session, HousingX attendees will leave with a better understanding of the needs faced by unhoused people, the policies that harm rather than help, and be better able to address their own communities dealing with the realities of houselessness.

Please review these materials before the session.

Continuing Education Credits

Several HousingX sessions are being submitted for accreditation by AIA Virginia and APA Virginia. Upon approval, credit hours will be updated in each session’s description. For questions regarding accreditation or other continuing education credits, please contact housingx@housingforwardva.org.