In an abandoned building near Spain's Mediterranean coast, someone softly strums a guitar. Chord progressions echo through empty halls.
It's an impromptu music lesson, offered among unemployed neighbors in Alfafar, a suburb south of Valencia. The town was built in the 1960s for timber factory workers. It's high-density housing: tidy, identical two- and three-bedroom apartments, in huge blocks ā some 7,000 housing units in total.
But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago are going for 20,000 now.
That guitar lesson is just one way residents are using their free time and empty space creatively. It's here that two young Spanish architects saw potential.
[For more of this story, written by Lauren Frayer and Ari Shapiro, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...ents-with-co-housing]
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