What do you think would happen if you invited an individual with mental health issues who had been homeless for many years to move directly from the street into housing? Loyd Pendleton shares how he went from skeptic to believer in the Housing First approach to homelessness -- providing the displaced with short-term assistance to find permanent ...

In the 19th century, schools provided free housing for teachers. Gregg Garn, a dean at the University of Oklahoma, makes an eloquent argument to restart this tradition. In this fascinating talk, Garn reviews the brutal economics of being a teacher -- and asks how we as communities can enhance the quality of life for our best and brightest instru...

Artist Ian Strange turns decrepit suburban homes into art. Using paint and chainsaws, photography and film, he interrogates our concept of home and the narratives we build around it. In this talk, Strange discusses the creative and personal impulses behind his work, and invites us to challenge our own relationships with the places we call home.

When architect Antón García-Abril moved to Boston, he quickly discovered that his budget wouldn't stretch to the sort of airy, modern home he had in his native Madrid. His solution: to ship a prefabricated house from Madrid to Boston. Using video documentation to illustrate his point, García-Abril explains how his home-in-a-box could represent t...

Frustrated by her lack of self-determination in the housing market, Sarah Murray created a computer game that allows home buyers to design a house and have it delivered to them in modular components that can be assembled on-site. Learn how her effort is putting would-be homeowners in control of the largest purchase of their lives -- as well as c...

By 2100, the UN estimates that the world's population will grow to just over 11 billion people. Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti wants us to start thinking about how we'll house all these people -- and how new construction can fight climate change rather than make it worse. In this visionary talk, Chakrabarti proposes a "Goldilocks" solution to sus...

The housing market can be vexing: while some neighborhoods get ridiculously expensive and price out longtime residents, others have historic homes sitting vacant without demand. Equitable housing developer and TED Fellow Bree Jones shares how she found a way to revitalize neighborhoods experiencing hyper-vacancy while preventing gentrification -...

Michael McDaniel designed housing for disaster relief zones -- inexpensive, easy to transport, even beautiful – but found that no one was willing to build it. Persistent and obsessed, he decided to go it alone. At TEDxAustin, McDaniel show us his Exo Reaction Housing Solution, and asks us to prepare for the next natural disaster.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design.

Beginning in the 1800s, people began writing clauses into property deeds that were meant to prevent all future owners from selling or leasing to certain racial groups, especially Black people. These racial covenants spread like wildfire throughout the US, making cities more segregated and the suburbs more restricted. Kevin Ehrman-Solberg and Kir...

Rebecca Onie asks audacious questions: What if waiting rooms were a place to improve daily health care? What if doctors could prescribe food, housing and heat in the winter? At TEDMED she describes Health Leads, an organization that does just that -- and does it by building a volunteer base as elite and dedicated as a college sports team.

Here's a fact: Not a single American working full-time for minimum wage can afford to buy a one-bedroom home. For many, mobile homes offer a way to break into homeownership. But owning a mobile home is risky, because these communities are virtually invisible and have few rights. Sociologist Esther Sullivan lists the reasons why mobile homeowners...

Climate change is the epic challenge of our lives, and community leaders like Rahwa Ghirmatzion and Zelalem Adefris are already working on sustainable, resilient solutions. Through their organizations in Buffalo and Miami, they're focused on durable, affordable housing for under-resourced communities, the most vulnerable to the instability of cl...

Lloyd Pendleton wants to eliminate chronic homelessness.

Income inequality is the highest it's been in nearly a century. Wage declines are making home ownership more and more difficult, leading people to become renters. Housing advocate Yale Fox thinks this is a huge problem, since most renters have little power to change fluctuating market prices or the condition of their rentals. In this talk, Fox i...

A selection of potentially planet-saving TED Talks from Countdown, TED's initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis

Several crises are set to define the next century -- but journalist Aaron Bastani believes we have the technological ability to meet our biggest challenges and create unprecedented levels of prosperity for all. He shows how we could get there by ditching capitalism as the world's economic operating system and adopting "universal basic services,"...

Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata -- all the major cities across India have one great thing in common: they welcome people arriving in search of work. But what lies at the other end of such openness and acceptance? Sadly, a shortage of housing for an estimated 100 million people, many of whom end up living in informal settlements. Gautam Bhan, a h...

When asked to build housing for 100 families in Chile ten years ago, Alejandro Aravena looked to an unusual inspiration: the wisdom of favelas and slums. Rather than building a large building with small units, he built flexible half-homes that each family could expand on. It was a complex problem, but with a simple solution — one that he arrived...

Cities are engines of culture, commerce, knowledge and community, but they're also centers of inequality and poverty. As the world rebuilds from the coronavirus pandemic, can we transform cities into bastions of equity and sustainability? Architect and educator Vishaan Chakrabarti discusses a new urban agenda that provides equitable housing, hea...

Rahwa Ghirmatzion is executive director of People United for Sustainable Housing, a membership-based community organization committed to social and climate justice.

MORROW's founding chairman Liu Thai Ker is widely recognized as the "architect of modern Singapore" for his extensive contributions to the country’s housing and urban landscape.

Michael Green wants to solve architecture’s biggest challenge -- meeting worldwide housing demand without increasing carbon emissions -- by building with carbon-sequestering wood instead of concrete and steel.

2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair is co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks architecture solutions to global crises -- and acts as a conduit between the design community and the world's humanitarian needs.

TED Fellow Bree Jones is an equitable housing developer.

Rahul Mehrotra is an architect working in India who focuses on institutional buildings and conservation of historic places. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Sarah Murray is building a future of democratized design and construction.

BCG's Sylvain Duranton thinks that only human input can save us from a high-tech bureaucracy.

Alejandro Aravena works inside paradoxes, seeing space and flexibility in public housing, clarity in economic scarcity, and the keys to rebuilding in the causes of natural disasters. He

Writing on urban development, sexual and reproductive rights, gender and queerness, OluTimehin Adegbeye resists marginalization by reminding her audiences of the validity of every human experience.