Modern Family Institute leads innovative conference with Johns Hopkins University

This convening, co-organized and sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Economy and Society, starts with a simple premise: the current housing crisis is not merely a crisis of quantity, but of quality–namely, that there are many ways of living and caring for one another that are currently not supported by our physical architecture, city planning, business models, laws, and social norms. This is a problem for supporting flourishing among families of all kinds. The convening will take place in Albequerque, New Mexico from April 11-13th.

This convening will ask: how did we get to where we are today? How can we create better built environments that accommodate and support the increasing diversity of family structures, ways of living, and ways of caring for one another? What barriers stand in the way of achieving this type of pluralism? What models are there in the past or in nascent form in the present that would allow us to live together in different ways?   

Our convening brings together a wide range of scholars and practitioners from across disciplines, backgrounds, and viewpoints: experts in the sociology of the family and housing policy; developers and architects; lenders and venture capitalists; journalists and urban historians. We hope that this gathering will be a launchpad for spinoff research in and across different domains.