Housing crises are some of the biggest problems faced by major cities today. From extortionate rents in San Francisco to accommodation shortages in Dublin, the basic need for shelter is just not being met for far too many people around the world. Homelessness is becoming an increasingly insurmountable challenge, and local councils and governments are often unable to come up with effective solutions to it. Consequently, it often falls on architects and designers to envision the ways through which these problems might be tackled. Now, a new concept by the Norwegian/American design studio Framlab is aiming to practically address the issue of homelessness in New York City.

The Homed scheme aims to take on New York?s homelessness problem by mounting clusters of metal pods on the walls of local buildings. Homeless rates are rising every year in the city, which has seen an astounding 40 percent increase in the number of people living on the streets in the past five years alone. Framlab?s proposal would see a repurposing of the unused gable walls of high-rise buildings all throughout the city (often present in vacant corner plots or on unused tracts of land) into foundations for honeycomb-shaped sleeping pod structures. There is already an abundance of these windowless walls throughout New York, and good use could be made of them to benefit the homeless population. Framlab says that “although almost every square foot of space in NYC has been claimed, there still manages to ...