The council session on affordable housing - "Affordability Follows Form" - was among the most earnest of sessions at the Congress of the New Urbanist's confab in Providence today. The session was opened by CNU President John Norquist, who got a packed ballroom in the mood with slides, including Rogers Park, in Chicago, where an apartment building exists with apparent harmony on the same block as single-family houses; Pruitt-Igoe, demolished in St. Louis decades ago; a house in Madison, Wis., whose three garage doors face the street from two directions; and, to illustrate a lovely though hardly affordable place, Thomas Street, in Providence, where all of the most artful buildings are owned by the Providence Art Club, and the condos on the corner fetch millions. There was the inevitable highway ramp right of way, with grass but no purpose, let alone affordable housing.
The fireworks were lit by moderator Richard Godfrey, who runs the Rhode Island Housing & Mortgage Financing Corporation. Of his schooling, he said he couldn't draw houses, so he "went into policy, so now he just beats up on architects." He cited one town in Rhode Island that requires a 1,000-foot buffer between any new house and any existing house, and another where developers are forced to build streets wide enough to accommodate a hook and ladder in any development with 20 foot driveways - though zoning already mandates 40-foot setbacks anyway. Richard pointed out that Rhode Island had the fastest-growing house prices and the lowest rate of affordable-housing growth. Regulations are forcing out any but the highest price point of new development, so no wonder there's a crisis in affordable housing. Such pernicious government disincentives prevail throughout the nation. Richard finally summoned up the vision of a town called SUVville, where all must own an SUV with all the trimmings - no affordable driving there! After ending on an upbeat note - that builders can build the way out of the affordable housing crisis if regulators will get out of the way - Richard handed the mike to Mark Nickita, of Archive Design Studio, in Detroit.
Mark urged the council to keep the shifting definition of affordability in mind. Affordable housing in San Francisco and Boston is something very different from affordable housing in Memphis and Detroit, not to mention Rio de Jainero or, for that matter, throughout the Third World. It differs not just city to city, but within a city and between it and its suburbs, and among its outlying areas. Mark showed a slide of a not overly rundown house in Detroit sitting on a large patch of land, on which more affordable housing could be built. He reminded us that in too many areas, affordable housing was the part of town not yet reached by gentrification, and that the problem cannot be addressed adequately without understanding the variable definitions of affordability.
Variable, too, and indeed pernicious were the results of a survey brought to the attention of the council by Bill Gietema, of Arcadia Realty Group. Gearing up to build a traditional neighborhood development north of Dallas for an ecumenical church group, Bill's firm surveyed its members and discovered that its tastes were not what he'd expected. Seems the parishioners' idea of impressive housing leans away from the well-proportioned, elegantly detailed house most New Urbanists might prefer and toward the more gaudy house most people would describe as a classic McMansion, with a superabundance of arches, a mountain range of gables, and Palladian windows on steroids. "What we thought was best, they thought was worst" he said of the 1,200 souls surveyed. "They hated what we loved." Bill reiterated his company's frustration at the high cost of securing zoning permits - making affordability such a stretch - but cautioned that New Urbanists must learn to understand and (no less of a challenge!) to respect the preferences of the species whose habitat is North Dallas - who exist throughout the nation.
Perry Bigelow, of Bigelow Homes, reiterated perhaps the most often cited reason behind the affordable-housing crisis by repeating Andres Duany's idea that America is a middle-class nation with upper-class expectations. Perry asserted that those expectations have morphed into the minimum standards of zoning codes around the nation. Requirements such as that mandating sprinklers where smoke detectors are more than sufficient to save lives push minimum construction costs for houses up toward $400,000 in some places - clearly a major obstacle to affordable housing. Developers can't afford to build affordable houses even if they want to.
The principal architect of Marianne Cusato Associates, now famous for her Katrina Cottage, told the council that "instead of going after the affordable market, the affordable market had come after us." Marianne described how, in the months since the cottage was unveiled, the world in all of its classes had beat a path to her door - not just those speaking for the homeless of Katrina but the wealthy who supposed her cottage might fit snugly onto their land in the Catskills. She counted the many potential non-FEMA uses to which the cottages might be affordably put, from business incubators to resort villages, but especially for elderly housing.
Marianne put her finger on the allure of her cottage: "We like to say we rise above style at CNU, but style really does matter. The details matter. People look at the cottage and they like it, and they identify with it. Dignity in affordable housing is crucial." But while people may want Katrina Cottages for resorts, or for Grandma, installing the cottages in the Gulf is Job One.
The council broke up into groups to answer a series of important questions. My own question, unasked in the rush of typing the notes from which this report has been distilled, is whether the Katrina Cottage is stackable?
Upon the reassembly of the council, Steve Maun, principal of Leyland Alliance LLC, bemoaned the increasing specialization of the affordability segment of the market, so much that only a few companies know how to do it. "The average builder should be more interested in building these kinds of units," he said. "It should not be a niche." Steve pointed out that in New York, the city's regulations are such that "you must be a community development corporation to participate" in the affordable housing market.
After more largely dispiriting commentary, the council ended on an upbeat note, with John Norquist assuring us that this discussion, "while it might depress us all, highlights a subject that must motivate us to find ways to put more houses into the community that more people can afford to live in."
-David Brussat is the architecture critic for the Providence Journal and a member of the paper's editorial board. He appears on the Daily NUws as a special guest correspondent.
