We Stayed: Moths to the Lantern

While our third year colleagues set off to play global jetsetter, the rest of us waited on a limo to be wined and dined in Fair Haven Heights - it was just a bus and apple cider. On Howard Street, teachers, students, professors, and locals were welcome to tour the home the first year MArch I students had designed and built over the past nine months.
The 2025 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project is dubbed The Lantern, and as dusk approached it was obvious why. In the evening of October 3rd, at the three story project, meant for one tenant in the elevated residential home and a small group in its ground floor community space, YSoA students and faculty mingled with guests of Friends Center for Children. We made small conversation on the design, the construction process, and the mission: a rent-free dwelling for an early childhood educator.

There were multiple speeches given behind a temporary podium. They were a celebratory, in-person version of everything said on Yale News, local news, and even the NYT the year before. And of course, we were happy to be there and believed in everything that was being said. It did feel great to be building a home for somebody, even more so, to be part of something larger in this political climate.
There is, though, a little paradox that lingers in the back of your mind when something you’ve done gains so much publicity. Yet, seeing Yale on its soapbox about building one house reminds us of a rich friend who is unable to give a dollar to a homeless person without bragging about how generous they are.

The Building Project began in response to student unrest in the 1960s as a way to “commit to social action by building for the poor.” Currently, it seems, at best, like a feel-good band-aid to a nationwide issue, promoting an unreplicable housing model. Can it be reproduced with paid construction workers and without donated materials? At worst, it is merely an optics-promoter or reputation-strengthener. The circus then becomes a megaphone to project Yale’s benevolence rather than the necessary financial investment generator to keep this Building Project train rolling.
We must be as critical as students were at the founding of this project. In the studio, we must talk of the politics of the things we build, and the things we can’t. We should discuss what it means to build houses that are rent-free, not employment-dependent, and how that is one of the best things we can foster as of now. We must ask why is New Haven not affordable? What more can the big, blue, bulldog-shaped elephant in the room do? How can we turn a good thing into a great thing?
We should celebrate the Lantern without being moths to a flame.