Design and Affordable American Housing
AbstractAmericans have experimented with new models for affordable housing for more than two centuries. The private sector, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations have all played a role. Architecture and site planning have been crucial elements in these efforts, yet they have received scant attention. In arguing that the design of good housing is neither elusive nor subjective, this article explores some of the best practices-and a few mistakes. The article begins with a historical background of diverse endeavors to provide better, more affordable housing for single women, workers, public housing tenants, immigrants, homeless individuals, and low-income families. It then relates this legacy to recent efforts to integrate housing with community development.IntroductionGiven the U.S. history of housing booms and busts and a penchant for novelty, Americans have experimented for more than two centuries with innovations and reforms that promised to produce less expensive, better quality housing for more people. These promises were sometimes marketing ploys or political rhetoric. Public programs have never provided more than 5 percent of total U.S. housing production, and the poorest citizens have often been left out. Nonetheless, the goal of expanding affordable housing has been resonant in the public and private realms, including the fields of architecture and construction.Builders have pursued ways to economize since the late 19th century. Private philanthropists constructed "model tenements," hoping to elevate a deplorable building type with simplified designs, public health, and moral uplift. Experiments with neoteric building materials and construction systems sought to reduce production costs. States and municipalities funded cooperatives. The federal government created the first public housing for the unemployed "deserving poor" during the Great Depression-although the main concerns were job creation and support for the private sector.1The Federal Housing Administration's (FHA's) financial supports for suburbanization joined postWorld War II (WWII) shelter magazines in promoting small, visibly modern "economy houses" for suburban workingand middle-class families-if they lived in White neighborhoods (Harris, 2013).2 Addressing the assisted low-income housing stock, President Lyndon Johnson's 1968 task forces on urban poverty and violence lambasted the shortage of good subsidized housing, yet resolutely condemned modern highrises (NCUP, 1968).These efforts ground to a halt with President Richard Nixon's 1973 moratorium on housing and community development assistance. When federal funding for housing was reinstated, it focused principally on vouchers for private developers. New assisted housing production never again approached the level of the early 1970s. Design innovations persisted in very local and transgressive ways, however, as religious groups and community design corporations built small-scale "contextual" enclaves. By the 1980s and 1990s, urban activists had formed coalitions based on housing issues as varied as gentrification, job training, and historic preservation.Architecture is a crucial element in achieving good housing, yet it usually plays at best a minor role in deliberations about cost and value.3 This contradiction stems in part from fundamental misconceptions. Architecture is not a matter of taste or mere aesthetics. Design quality is crucial to good affordable housing. The skillful organization of interiors, views, public areas, outdoor spaces, and even facades is especially important when budgets and square footage are at a premium (Davis, 2004; Feldman and Koch, 2004; KEA, 2006).As many practitioners and scholars have documented, good design is not elusive or subjective.4 Four themes characterize the best practices, whatever the era, scale, aesthetic, or auspices.1. The direct involvement of residents encourages better design. Diverse groups have asserted their distinctive needs and preferences, sometimes challenging the architects' priorities and the power of cultural norms. …
Redesigning The American Dream Gender Housing And Family Life
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The role of limited‐equity cooperatives in providing affordable housing
Abstract This article develops an economic analysis of the role of limited‐equity cooperatives (LECs) in providing affordable housing. Using a model of the user costs of housing that focuses on housing externalities, it examines methods for overcoming externalities in multiunit rental dwellings. Investment in management can reduce these externalities and thereby improve the quality of the housing environment, but the added cost excludes low‐income households from housing with a high level of management. LECs can reduce housing externalities without imposing the dollar costs of management on residents. They do this principally by attempting to attract a favorable resident population and by substituting self‐management for traditional hierarchical management. Given these findings, the article makes recommendations regarding the structure of a federally sponsored LEC program and draws implications for affordable housing policies in general. Finally, it calls for further empirical research into the desirable ...