Can we address what Engels called “the housing question?” The architect Patrik Schumacher says no. During a keynote panel at a 2013 conference, he claimed that “reality is no longer posing that question.” Schumacher was rejecting the idea that public housing has contemporary relevance, arguing that it is naïve and “regressive” to return to this “bureaucratic” framework.

It was a stunning moment. Five years after a housing market collapse initiated a global financial crisis, a leading practical theorist of architecture was declaring “that question” off topic and outmoded. One hardly needs to recite the statistics of foreclosures, evictions, or market rents in major cities to understand that housing remains a problem for huge numbers of people.

But from Schumacher’s perspective, the matter of how people organize where to live cannot be framed as an active problem in search of new approaches from professional architects.