In 2012, a few months into a job at a Flint firm, I opened the Genesee County Land Bank’s map of vacant parcels. Nearly half the city was shaded. It’s one thing to see the data. It’s another to walk it, so I did, block by block, that first year, reading the city through the map and then against it.
What I found was not only vacancy. It was absence. The architecture firms had left Flint along with the capital. The people who stayed had lost, a generation earlier, any working relationship with an architect. When I introduced myself as one, the reaction was usually polite confusion about what I was for.
This note is what I’ve learned about being for something in a city like that. It’s written for the architect who is already there, in Youngstown, Gary, Saginaw, East St. Louis, or anywhere the market has walked away, or who is thinking about going.
Why “resident”
I call it the Resident Citizen Architect. Resident, because the architect lives in the place and stays: embedded in a disinvested city the way medicine embeds doctors in underserved hospitals, serving it directly for years while building the people and institutions that will serve it after. Three currents run through it:
- Serve the place. Do the work the market won’t pay for, first.
- Share the methods. Write down what you learn, in a form someone else can use, and give it away.
- Build the people. Teach from practice, and make the introductions you’re not paid to make.
None of this is new. Public-interest design, participatory action research, the architect as facilitator: the literature is thick. What’s different is the duration and the vehicle. One architect, one city, fourteen years, and a legal structure built to survive it. That’s what makes the architect a resident rather than a visitor.
The premise
A disinvested city doesn’t lack design problems. It lacks anyone positioned to take them on without a fee. An architect who lives there, stays there, and volunteers the first drawings earns something no consultant can buy: trust, one coffee meeting at a time. Trust converts to work, work to grants, grants to buildings, but only if the practice is built to put mission ahead of profit, because the market will keep trying to pull it back.
The five moves
1. Read the map, then walk it
Find the map that shows the scale of the problem. Every disinvested city has one, usually held by a land bank, a planning department, or a university. Print it large. Then walk the shaded parts and note what the map can’t tell you: which porches have people on them, which lots a neighbor mows, where the churches are, where the water pools. Join whatever public planning process is running. You’re not there to lead. You’re there to be seen listening.
Where it goes wrong: arriving with a proposal. The city has seen the charrette-and-leave model before and has a name for it. The first year is for reading, not drawing.
2. Volunteer the first drawing
Wait to be asked, then say yes to something small: a planter, a porch, a pavilion concept, a site plan for a community garden. The request matters more than the project. It means someone has decided an architect might be useful. Draw it so the people who asked can build it: standard dimensions, materials with a known price, a sheet rather than a set. Then show up on build day.
Where it goes wrong: over-drawing. A full set of construction documents for a porch tells the neighborhood you don’t understand the porch. And if you’re not there when it’s built, you were a consultant after all.
3. Build the vehicle that survives
I formed Urban Colab as a low-profit limited liability company (L3C), a structure whose charter says the social purpose governs. It isn’t a charity. It’s a signal to funders, boards, and myself that the market doesn’t get the last word. Expect the vehicle to run empty for years. Urban Colab was formed in 2016 and paid me nothing until 2020. Keep the day job until it pays.
Learn the money your clients can’t: foundation grants, historic tax credits, workforce programs. Writing grants isn’t an architect’s job. In a disinvested city it is the job, because that capital is what turns volunteer design into buildings. And understand the arithmetic before you draw: when new construction appraises at half its cost, the design problem isn’t what to add. It’s how to serve without displacing.
Where it goes wrong: two ways. Letting the vehicle become a normal firm because a normal client finally called, or letting it become a charity, which can’t keep an architect in the city. The L3C is the narrow path between.
4. Write it down and give it away
Every time a project teaches you something transferable, write it in the form of a tool, not a story: a design guide with typologies, dimensions, and prices; a cookbook of case studies; a walking guide to the buildings people pass every day without knowing their names. Publish it free, somewhere you don’t own the shelf.
Talk about the place, not the practice. The Flint story travels because it’s about a city, not a firm. The Coffee Sketch Podcast is the same instrument at a different scale: two hundred conversations that have reached listeners in 146 countries. It has never earned a dollar. It isn’t supposed to.
Where it goes wrong: writing the story instead of the tool. A case study that ends “and it was a great success” transfers nothing. A guide with a lumber list transfers everything.
5. Build the people
Teach from the project you’re working on this week. The practitioner-professor isn’t a compromise between two careers; it’s how the model reproduces. Run a studio on real sites with the real client in the room. Mentor past graduation, without a fee and without an end date: portfolio reviews, licensure coaching, references, and above all introductions.
Then watch for the method leaving. When a former student chooses adaptive reuse in another city because she once drew a Flint cornice, write it down. That’s the evidence it was a method and not a personality.
Where it goes wrong: counting students instead of naming them. Nobody replicates a headcount.
Start here
If you’re an architect in a city like Flint, here’s the calendar:
- Month 1. Find the map. Walk one shaded neighborhood a week. Attend one public planning meeting. Introduce yourself as an architect to one person who isn’t one.
- Year 1. Say yes to the first small request. Draw it as a sheet. Be there when it’s built. Start a pin map. Sit at two coalition tables without presenting.
- Year 2. Form the vehicle: an L3C, a benefit corporation, or a written mission clause in an ordinary LLC. Keep the day job. Write your first grant for a client.
- Year 3. Write down the first transferable lesson as a tool with dimensions and prices. Publish it somewhere you don’t own. Say yes to the first talk about the place.
- Year 5. Teach, from practice. Run one studio on a real site with the client in the room.
- Year 7 and after. Make the introduction. Watch for the method leaving. When it does, write to me.
This is a seed. I’m developing it into a full field guide with recipes from Flint projects, and I’ll grow this note as that comes together.