OFFCUT: Affordable Housing and Industrial Belonging
School: Harvard GSD | MArch Option Studio: New Creative Worker Housing in NYC Professor: Jeanne Gang | Semester: Spring 2026 | Studio Partner: Shreya Sood
Astoria’s industrial corridor has always been an active area of making - furniture, metal, signs, ceramics, food, electronics. Yet its vibrant community of makers, at every scale from freelance artists to the workforce of local factories, are structurally vulnerable to displacement from the neighborhoods they sustain. Existing zoning tools fail on both ends: Industrial Business Zones protect manufacturing but prohibit housing, while the LIC Mixed-Use District permits both but protects neither, leaving manufacturing and affordable housing equally exposed.
Offcut proposes a new regulatory instrument, the Maker Mixed-Use District, that doesn’t just allow for coexistence between industry and housing, but requires it. Within the district, which spans 175 acres across the heart of industrial Astoria, a minimum of 20% of floor area must be dedicated to industrial/manufacturing facilities and fabrication space, residential is built above, including Mandatory Inclusionary Housing units, and active frontages along a pedestrian-flex corridor require a mix of production, commercial, or retail uses. The district makes interdependence between living and making a legal condition of development.
The building that anchors this new district sits at the fractured intersection of 10th Street and Vernon Boulevard, cut off from Socrates Park to the north, the Noguchi Museum to the west, and a largely inaccessible East River waterfront. The proposal repairs these connections through flood mitigation, marshland reintroduction, intersection reengineering, a 10th Street pedestrianization, and a maker yard that connects the manufacturing floor to the street and beyond to the park’s public maker shops. The building stacks light and medium industry at ground level below affordable housing for the makers, artists, and working families who have defined this neighborhood for decades. The offcut, reclaimed.
