What is Kinder-SoH? Is that a candy from overseas?
No. Kinder = The Kinder Institute at Rice University, which is a nationally recognized hub for data-driven research on urban planning. Think: housing, transportation, infrastructure, and climate resilience. For architecture and sustainability professionals, the Institute’s work provides critical insights into the intersection of policy + the built environment + vulnerable regions/ populations. “SoH” refers to their annual State of Housing Report. These reports help professionals – across several fields that deal directly with city populations – to design or alter their social impacts, land use, and advocacy. If anyone’s designing for resilience without reading Kinder, they’re flying blind. But once you dig in, you find this is where polite professionals meet hard truths.
This report is the yearly diss track of the urban planning world. KIRU’s work is one of our region’s most methodical chroniclers of inequality, housing decay, and systemic neglect. Their research pulls the rugs up and parades how untidy we’ve been. Each report reveals the human cost of our built environment, with near-forensic documentation of underfunded infrastructure and continuing climate vulnerability. The State of Housing Report doesn’t have to be a diss track. But until we plan better and start fixing some things, it will continue to be so.
Builders Without Borders 