Longtime affordable housing advocate John Henneberger has been named a MacArthur Fellow.
He is among 21 individuals selected to each receive a $625,000 stipend paid out over five years. The fellowship comes with no stipulations or reporting requirements, allowing recipients maximum freedom to follow their creative visions, says the MacArthur Foundation.
Artist Rick Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses in Houston, has also been named a Fellow. Working with artists, he organized the purchase and restoration of a block and a half of derelict properties—22 shotgun houses from the 1930s—in Houston’s predominantly African American Third Ward and turned them into an amalgam of arts venue and community support center. Project Row Houses has been an anchor for the neighborhood, providing arts education for youth, exhibition space for artists, and incubator for historically appropriate designs for low-income housing on land surrounding the original row houses
Henneberger, 59, is co-director of the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service in Austin.
He is the architect of a conciliation agreement with the state of Texas for Hurricanes Dolly and Ike post-disaster rebuilding. Henneberger also worked with architects and community development corporations to rebuild housing better and faster after the disasters. He organized a competition that challenged architects to design a permanent home that could be delivered quickly and cost less than a FEMA trailer.
Fellows are selected through a rigorous process that has involved thousands of expert and anonymous nominators, evaluators, and selectors over the years. The Foundation does not accept unsolicited or outside nominations.
