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Media portrayals of college life often show the dorm as a melting pot, where students from a diversity of backgrounds get thrown together to learn about life beyond the classroom. But the reality is that just one in five coeds in the U.S. today actually live on campus in such a setup. Many live off campus, a majority face significant affordability challenges, and stable student housing is far from a givenan ongoing crisis that threatens the achievement of higher education. An experiment in housing affordability, which turned a dilapidated motel into a new home for students, is a case study in building cheaper, more affordable student housing, and ideally an example of how to create a more equitable college experience. Recently opened in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, Abigail Court offers a new model for serving the significant population of college students in dire need of affordable housing. What was once a falling-apart motel has been remade into a series of 70 studio apartments with an airy common room and a brick-lined courtyard. It houses students from Mt. Hood Community College, Portland State University, and Portland Community College. Its the work of College Housing Northwest (CHNW), a Portland nonprofit focused on designing and building affordable, accessible spaces for students. For this 55-year-old nonprofit, Abigail Court became a new model for funding and creating a space thats better suited for students to study. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] As the nations college population began an upswing starting in the 1960s and 70s, due in large part to expanding access to more Americans from different economic backgrounds, the cost of collegeand especially housing near schoolbegan increasing as well. Room and board, the fastest-growing expense for students, can often be more than tuition, said Jim Rader, CHNWs executive director. There was an expectation when the organization started in the 60s that any college student had family support and didnt need to worry about housing costs. A 2025 report from Temple Universitys Hope Center, which studies challenges in college life, found that 48% of U.S. college students are experiencing housing insecurity today, with 14% having experienced homelessness. Student housing is also one part of the affordable housing puzzle that often doesnt get addressed, and its a crucial one, since enabling students to make it through to graduation helps them better their earning potential and access better housing later in life. According to Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociologist and academic who studies college affordability, existing research clearly shows that housing access and affordability greatly improve educational outcomes for students. A multiyear study Goldrick-Rab ran in Tacoma, Washington, found that federal housing assistance for students not only increased their graduation rates but also improved their overall physical health; they had fewer emergency room visits, lower rates of food insecurity, and fewer interactions with police or law enforcement. Its a huge deal, Goldrick-Rab said. About 50% of college students are struggling with rent. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] Today, the nations colleges and universitiesincluding community colleges, which often draw more working-class and low-income studentshave begun to build out more dorms and housing meant to help close the gap, but institutions dont have the means to meet the scale of the challenge. Goldrick-Rab believes many institutions starting to build out housing simply arent experienced as developers or landlords. In addition, two of the nations more prominent affordable housing programsLIHTC, or the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which finances new housing construction, and Section 8, a voucher program to help assist with rental paymentsdont apply to college students. Along with a booming for-profit student housing industry (the surging sector of commercial real estate saw $8.5 billion in transactions last year alone), this lack of public funding has created a college housing market much like the larger rental market in the U.S.: lots of high-priced, market-rate options, a handful of highly subsidized units for those most in need, and a widening gap for those with low to middle-range incomes. CHNW was able to afford to do the Abigail Court project via an Oregon state program called Project Turnkey, which launched in 2020 to help create housing for Oregonians displaced by wildfires. Alex Wallace, a real estate manager at CHNW, heard about the program and decided to see if it might be applicable to college students. CHNW proposed to use funds to turn the Ponderosa Inn of Gresham, Oregon, into a new kind of student residence, and was awarded about $6 million from Project Turnkey to acquire the property. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] The nonprofit spent another $8 million to adaptively redevelop the lodging into modern student housing, which added up to about $112,000 per unit, less than half what Wallace estimates it would take to build a brand-ne dorm from scratch. The whole build-out, which took 18 months, opened last September with rent for a studio set at $915; its now 100% leased, and a state-funded rental assistance program helps 32 students pay functionally zero rent. In May, CHNW got approval to use state tax credits for affordable student housing, and hopes to use this ability to buy a 100-unit building near Portland State University that it can convert into a similar housing project. Hotels and motels of this size are great for small housing, Rader says. We go into these areas where theres a community college, its often in need of revitalization, and these renovations can help revitalize the community.
Category:
E-Commerce
Can we measure what is in our hearts and minds, and could it help us end wars any sooner? These are the questions that consume entrepreneur Shawn Guttman, a Canadian émigré who recently gave up his yearslong teaching position in Israel to accelerate a path to peaceusing an algorithm. Living some 75 miles north of Tel Aviv, Guttman is no stranger to the uncertainties of conflict. Over the past few months, miscalculated drone strikes and imprecise missile targetssome intended for larger citieshave occasionally landed dangerously close to his town, sending him to bomb shelters more than once. When something big happens, we can point to it and say, Right, that happened because five years ago we did A, B, and C, and look at its effect, he says over Google Meet from his office, following a recent trip to the shelter. Behind him, souvenirs from the 1979 Egypt-Israel and 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaties are visible. Im tired of that perspective. The startup he cofounded, Didi, is taking a different approach. Its aim is to analyze data across news outlets, political discourse, and social media to identify opportune moments to broker peace. Inspired by political scientist I. William Zartmans ripeness theory, the algorithmcalled the Ripeness Indexis designed to tell negotiators, organizers, diplomats, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) exactly when conditions are ripe to initiate peace negotiations, build coalitions, or launch grassroots campaigns. During ongoing U.S.-led negotiations over the war in Gaza, both Israel and Hamas have entrenched themselves in opposing bargaining positions. Meanwhile, Israels traditional allies, including the U.S., have expressed growing frustration over the war and the dire humanitarian conditions in the enclave, where the threat of famine looms. In Israel, Didis data is already informing grassroots organizations as they strategize which media outlets to target and how to time public actions, such as protests, in coordination with coalition partners. Guttman and his collaborators hope that eventually negotiators will use the models insights to help broker lasting peace. Guttmans project is part of a rising wave of so-called PeaceTecha movement using technology to make negotiations more inclusive and data-driven. This includes AI from Hala Systems, which uses satellite imagery and data fusion to monitor ceasefires in Yemen and Ukraine. Another AI startup, Remesh, has been active across the Middle East, helping organizations of all sizes canvas key stakeholders. Its algorithm clusters similar opinions, giving policymakers and mediators a clearer view of public sentiment and division. A range of NGOs and academic researchers have also developed digital tools for peacebuilding. The nonprofit Computational Democracy Project created Pol.is, an open-source platform that enables citizens to crowdsource outcomes to public debates. Meanwhile, the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a peace agreement simulator, complete with a chart to track how well each stakeholders needs are met. Guttman knows its an uphill battle. In addition to the ethical and privacy concerns of using AI to interpret public sentiment, PeaceTech also faces financial hurdles. These companies must find ways to sustain themselves amid shrinking public funding and a transatlantic surge in defense spending, which has pulled resources away from peacebuilding initiatives. Still, Guttman and his investors remain undeterred. One way to view the opportunity for PeaceTech is by looking at the economic toll of war. In its Global Peace Index 2024, the Institute for Economics and Peaces Vision of Humanity platform estimated that economic disruption due to violence and the fear of violence cost the world $19.1 trillion in 2023, or about 13 percent of global GDP. Guttman sees plenty of commercial potential in times of peace as well. Can we make billions of dollars, Guttman asks, and save the worldand create peace? The Ripeness Index Every evening, Didis bots scrape the websites of 60 Israeli and 30 Palestinian media outlets, digesting keywords into its Ripeness Index model. The index, a colorful radar chart resembling a digital version of the vintage puzzle game Simon, aims to distill the complex dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian social unrest into simple categories. These categories indicate when the time may be right to push for peace through grassroots messaging and diplomatic activity. If the center of the index is red, it signals that conditions are not yet ripe for negotiations. In such cases, messaging efforts should focus on shifting the surrounding red sections of the model to yellow. Yellow indicates that both sides are beginning to recognize that the costs of continuing the conflict outweigh the benefits. The Ripeness Index scans news media to indicate when the conditions to start negotiations are met. In early May, Guttman and his cofounder, Keren Winter-Dinur, a doctoral student in conflict resolution, worked with a team of developers to put the system through its biggest test to date. The occasion was the annual Peoples Peace Summit in Jerusalem. This years summit was organized by the Its Time coalitiona network of dozens of grassroots organizations seeking solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflictand brought together 15,000 attendees from peace-focused groups on both sides of the border. Many of the summits events are talking about, Hey, Israelis, learn about and understand what Palestinians are going through, Guttman says. See the other. The ripeness theory of negotiation, first introduced by Zartman in 1989, proposes that conflicts become ripe for resolution when two conditions are met. The first is the experience of a mutually hurting stalemate, where both sides are suffering and see no viable, unilateral path to a satisfactory outcome. The second is that both parties perceive a way out of the conflict. At this moment of ripeness, the door to negotiation opens. Political scientist I. William Zartman (top right), now in his nineties, endorsed the ipeness Index, developed by Didi cofounders Keren Winter-Dinur (top left) and Shawn Guttman. More recently, as big datasets around conflict resolution have become more easily available, researchers have tried to quantitatively validate Zartmans theory on past diplomatic negotiations. Still, quantitative studies around ripeness theory remain limited. When they launched Didi in 2022, Guttman and Winter-Dinur began by testing their Ripeness Index model on a different conflict: the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. After scraping a decades worth of speeches from the U.K. Parliament, the team found that support for negotiated peace increased on both sides just before key political partnerships formed, while support for continuing armed struggle diminished. Then October 7th happened. Guttman and Winter-Dinur knew they needed to pivot to Israel’s war. They began localizing their training database in Hebrew and Arabic and started scraping regional news. Their dataset now extends back to September 26, 2023. I said, Lets jump into the deep waters and see how we do, Guttman recalls. As it scans the news media, the bot tracks specific terms associated with each section of the Ripeness Index, such as confident in winning or willingness to compromise. At the bottom of the dashboard, graphs plot the frequency of flagged keywords in Israeli and Arabic news outlets over time, aligned with the models criteria. For the Its Time coalition, the model also tracks mentions of affiliated organizations, such as the pro-peace group Women Wage Peace and a recent Israeli-Palestinian memorial gathering. Guttman believes grassroots organizations should be using this data every day to spread pro-peace messaging to the public, alongside documentation of wartime atrocities, and to challenge the belief that military victory is necessary. We should be moving as fast as the news cycle moves, he says. The large timeline view lets users explore Didis full dataset. One promising signal came in January, at the start of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when Guttman and his team observed a surge in Israeli sentiment toward compromise. According to the theory, that moment of ripeness was what gave the Israeli political echelon the legitimacy and the support to say, Okay, we’re going to have a ceasefire, we’re going to give humanitarian aid, we’re going to exchange Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages, Guttman says. But that sentiment declined soon after and dropped sharply in March. That same month, citing stalled ceasefire negotiations, Israel resumed its ground war in Gaza. Guttman interprets the public shift as a response to the perceived failure of political efforts to secure the return of Israeli hostages. Then, in the week leading up to the Peoples Peace Summit in early May, the model determined that both Israeli and Palestinian publics saw a potential way out of the war. Still, the moment was not yet ripe for negotiations. On the left side of the index, the confident in winning and impossibility of winning sections had yet to shift into the green zone. Individual graphs show timelines of keyword counts in the news media, grouped by two conditions in Zartmans ripeness theory: mutually hurting stalemate and way out. Alongside the insights Didi gathers from the news media, the Its Time coalition also has been collecting data from social media platforms, including Facebook and X. Social media sentiment analysis is on Didis road map as well, but Guttman and Winter-Dinur caution against using it as a source of ground truth. Guttman and his team are still learning the limitations of their own data, too. Manual validation is important because the AI still misclassifies news articles. And Guttman admits that the models capabilities in Arabic are not yet as good as they are in Hebrew, a problem future datasets will address, he says. What could go wrong? The companys mix of AI and big data will also need to win over skeptics in the world of diplomacy. One concern is that relying on historical data to make predictions and inform decision-making could lead to a repetition of past mistakes. Most of the time, any kind of prediction work, machine-enabled or human-enabled, is going wrong, says Martin Wählisch, associate professor of transformative technologies, innovation, and global affairs at the University of Birmingham. The representativeness of data is a major challenge for PeaceTech, says Wählisch, who founded his own startup in the space, Office for Dreams, which combines digital tools with creative strategies to facilitate decision-making. The currency is the data inflow, he says. Last month, Wählisch joined an interdisciplinary group of technologists, researchers, and peacebuilders at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development to define a vision for AI use in large-scale deliberation processes. One system, built at Googles DeepMind, uses large language models to assist with the mediation process itself. In experiments with more than 5,000 participants in the U.K., researchers found the system, named after the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, outperformed untrained human mediators, with 56% of participants preferring AI-generated statements over human ones. The tool also increased group agreement by about 8 percentage points and incorporated minority views. However, the researchers noted, AI-assisted deliberation is not without its risks. . . . Steps must be taken to ensure users are representative of the target population and are prepared to contribute in good faith. Still, many of these efforts are swimming upstream at a moment when defense startups are seeing increased focus and funding amid surging military budgets. According to Bloomberg, private investors have already spent around $790 million on defense this year. Compare that figure to the investing trend in the past two decades, when private equity spending on defense reached $1 billion in nly five of those years. Private investment in PeaceTech is still nascent. Peacebuilding startups have traditionally been supported by government grants and donors, but these are harder to find now. The U.S. Agency for International Developments Development Innovation Ventures, for instance, typically funded startups like Didi, until it was shuttered by the Trump administration. Didis angel investor, B Ventures Group, exclusively funds tech firms with peacebuilding applications. Other PeaceTech investors include Peaceinvest, which focuses on local, pro-peace projects, and Kluz Ventures, which runs the annual Kluz Prize for PeaceTech. Two years ago, Didi won a Kluz Prize, which came with a $20,000 cash award recognizing the companys achievements in machine learning. Peacebuilding has traditionally been seen as the domain of nonprofits and governments, not a space for venture capital, Brian Abrams, founder and managing partner of B Ventures Group, wrote in a March essay. At the same time, this type of opportunity has been associated with impact investing and lower returns, a trade-off many venture investors are unwilling to make. But PeaceTech challenges those assumptions, offering a model that prioritizes both profit and purpose. Pursuing profits means presenting PeaceTech as useful outside of conflict zones too, the way defense firms typically diversify their business with the sale of dual-use technologies. Palantir, for instanceknown for the AI-powered data tools it sells to military and immigration authoritiesalso works for Fortune 500 companies and develops tools for humanitarian purposes. After its software was used to facilitate Ukrainian refugee assistance, the company was awarded a special distinction by the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech in 2023, the same year Didi won its award. We need to expand the current dual-use framing of technologycivilian and militaryto a triple-use paradigm that includes peace as a third pillar, Artur Kluz, founder and CEO of Kluz Ventures, and Stefaan Verhulst, a research professor at New York University, wrote in a recent Fast Company op-ed. This would mean structuring investments in a way that not only supports battlefield advantage and economic competitiveness, but also actively contributes to conflict prevention, mediation, and resolution. Abrams sees many commercial opportunities in Didis tool: Imagine a private equity firm using the Ripeness Index to time its mergers and acquisitions perfectly, or a public relations firm tuning its crisis management messaging just right. Recent estimates gauge the market size for public opinion and election polling at $8.93 billion in 2025. In any scenario, developers and entrepreneurs must be mindful about the use of personal data, says Abrams. PeaceTech begins, I think, with Hippocratic guardrails. First, do no harm. Make sure the technology is contributing toward peace and not in any way being used for anything counterproductive, he says. That concern is heightened by the use of AI for political influence. Governments throughout history have sought to monitor and police public sentiment during times of war and peace. More recently, governments have used artificial intelligence to identify people for deportation and arrest, sometimes wrongfully. The expanding use of AI and data analysis tools to police social media accounts, and the increasing use of large language models (with their tendency to fabricate), exacerbates these risks. Algorithms already purport to track what millions of people are thinking, but there are few ways of knowing if those are correct. The true test of AI in diplomacy will not be whether it can pass the Turing test, but whether it can contribute to a more cooperative, stable, and just international order, writes Erman Akilli, professor of international relations at Ankaras Hac Bayram Veli University, in a blog post for the SETA Foundation for Political Economic and Social Research. He urges policymakers to regulate the use of AI in diplomacy to prevent the tech from being exploited for strategic manipulation or coercion. Promising trends Two days before the Peoples Peace Summit, Guttman noticed anomalies in the trends he had been seeing in the previous few weeks. Willingness to compromise had been on the uptick, but the double-whammy of Israels Memorial Day and Independence Day events had a notable impact on public sentiment. Everything leading up to Memorial Day and Independence Day, the way that people were talking was very much pro-military: remembering soldiers who died, remembering these tragic stories of heroism and so on, Guttman says. The confident in winning line started to rise, reflecting a perception that a military solution to war is still possible. In this timeline view, events surrounding Israels Memorial Day and Independence Day are superimposed. Meanwhile, the hurt measure in the Ripeness Index has remained green, as it has been for most of the war, reflecting the public sentiment that the price of war is too high. Despite that high price, Guttman says, many Israelis appear to believe that there’s nothing to do but pay it and keep fighting because the military can win. A very big victory would be increasing the sentiment in Israeli society that we can’t win the war militarily, he says. As the U.S. attempts to broker a new cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamasand as Israel launches a new war against Iranthe Didi team has been tracking a sudden, upward spike in the “Confident in Winning” indicator. More recently, Guttman and his team have offered a new recommendation to the Its Time Coalition and its partners as they push for peace: Link the high cost of war with the fact that military resources are limited and military options will eventually run out. In general, a missing element in Israeli discourse has been the connection between the feeling that the price of this war [in Gaza] is too high with the sentiment that we have exhausted our military options, says Guttman. Making this connection could create a tipping point in Israel discourse that pushes the Ripeness Index to yellow.
Category:
E-Commerce
Architects have long complained about the industry’s relatively paltry pay. Given the amount of expensive education architects require (master’s level), and the years they have to put in (many) before qualifying to take a licensure exam (arduous), they have been rightly upset: Architects can barely expect to crack the $100,000 salary mark after more than eight years in the profession. Now there are some numbers to back that up. Compared to every other design descipline Fast Company has studied in our our ongoing analysis of where the design jobs are, architects are underpaid, particularly as their careers progress. Their compensation increases at the slowest rate, based on years of experience. Fixing the problem requires a nuanced understanding of the outside factors that limit pay, according to Evelyn Lee, president of the American Institute of Architects. “Architecture is an industry that’s always been known to work within tight margins,” she says. Part of the reason is that the industry long ago set standardized fee structuresbasically a percentage of overall construction costsand those numbers haven’t changed much. “Our ability to get paid more is tied back to that,” Lee says. Architecture is also tied to economic cycles, and it can be a bellwether of recessions. “When things are good, and people are spending a lot of money on capital costs, we are doing well. But we’re usually the first service to get cut when people start to hold back, and we’re the last to come on board when the economy starts coming back,” Lee says. And because they’re never quite sure when the next project will come around, many architecture firms end up being conservative with their spending and salaries. Also, the highly competitive nature of the architecture industry means that it is governed by antitrust laws that prohibit price fixing. These laws are meant to encourage competition, but they often end up creating a race to the bottom. Firms underbid each other in order to secure commissions, and then rely on underpaid workers and uncompensated overtime to get the job done. “It’s very internalized in the profession, starting at the university level,” says Jennifer Siqueira, an architect at New York-based Bernheimer Architects who helped organize the first union at an architecture firm in the U.S. “You’re taught to work very hard because it’s like these are passion projects. It’s almost an artistic endeavor to do architecture . . . It’s a very exploitative environment.” All-nighters are common in the field, from university through the working world; Siqueira says that she herself worked through the night multiple times in previous jobs at architecture firms, including some that are very prominent. Part of the unionization effort she led at her current firm was centered around improving working conditions and making the level of pay match the level of effort. She and fellow union organizers even negotiated with the firm’s management to set salary floors based on years of experience. “It’s very rare, especially because in a lot of contracts you’ll see a clause saying you can’t even talk about what you make to another coworker,” Siqueira says. “This is a level of transparency that’s really lacking within the profession.” Lee, at the AIA, says that the association conducts its own compensation surveys in order to fill that void, but she explains that the upwind forces that limit architects’ fees and salaries are largely beyond the industry’s control. Still, that doesn’t mean architects should sit back and wallow in low fees forever. She says that the AIA has increased the number of training programs it provides that are geared toward the business side of running architecture firms, and it encourages architects to be more proactive in offering clients more than just the limited scope of a one-off building design. “I do think there’s an opportunity to get more savvy though about how we package and deliver our services in a way that better reflects the value that we bring to the table,” she says. Changing an industry takes time, especially one that is predominantly made up of small businesses. About 75% of the 19,000 architecture firms operating in the U.S. have 10 employees or fewer, and 28% are run by sole practitioners. Architects are “wearing many hats, as the marketer and the operations person,” Lee says. Other types of designers work within “a much bigger ecosystem, where they have business experts that are brought on to support non-project needs. We architects feel like we have to do that all on our own.” Lee, who has worked as a fractional chief operating officer for multiple small and medium-size architecture firms, says that the AIA is “trying to support our architects and tell them that it’s just as important to design their business as it is to deliver design as a practice.” But that may take longer than some architects are willing to wait. In the meantime, Siqueira says there’s a clear path toward improving pay and working conditions for architects: “The only way is to unionize,” she says. This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings.
Category:
E-Commerce
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