By Arrol Gellner
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
A while back, I wrote a column on why architects have so often failed at designing affordable housing. It drew a flurry of responses from my colleagues-some thoughtful, some merely huffy and self-righteous. A few architects who've spent a good portion of their careers developing affordable housing were understandably offended at being lumped in with the rest of us.
Many others missed the point altogether, which was that traditional architectural schooling all but guarantees an architect who'll design expensive buildings, not affordable ones.
Many respondents cited examples of successful, high-profile affordable housing projects aimed at low-income groups. Few acknowledged that the need for affordable housing is no longer limited to the poor-increasingly, it applies to the middle class as well. A spokesman for the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy recently noted that the rising cost of single-family homes was depriving "solidly middle-class households" of the chance to own a home. Supporting this contention, the median price of homes in the United States rose about six percent during 2001 alone, ahead of any rise in family earning, and despite the increasing reliance today's families place on dual incomes. Simple arithmetic will reveal the result: More people than ever are now deprived of the American dream of homeownership.
How can any nation expect to provide affordable housing for its poor when, increasingly, it can't even house its middle class? And can any place really be called a "community" when its own teachers, firefighters, cops and librarians can't afford to live there?
The reasons behind the rising cost of homes are manifold, as many correspondents pointed out. By heavily favoring loans for conventional housing types, conservative lending institutions help enforce formulaic, cookie-cutter development, while quashing promising housing ideas that fall outside the usual bounds.
Our nation's moribund zoning laws have a similar effect, though they do it by segregating usages and doggedly insisting on low densities and land-squandering building setbacks. Developers respond to these limitations as might be expected-not only by sticking to well-tried formulas, but also by concentrating on the sort of huge, overblown tract homes that yield the highest profits.
Architects have bills to pay too, and perhaps that's why so many of us in the profession seem unwilling to raise our voices against the idiocies of hyper-restrictive zoning and meddlesome design review boards-not to mention the clamoring of our clients for pointlessly oversized home designs. Strangely though, despite the many architects who voiced an opinion on the subject of affordable housing, not one cited the most successful and ubiquitous form of affordable housing there is-possibly because architects have had virtually nothing to do with its development. I'm talking of course about manufactured homes-those boxy, prefabricated units that used to be known as mobile homes and, before that, as trailers.
Despite garnering little more than contempt from the architectural profession during their more than 50 years of existence, manufactured homes are among the few housing types that actually deliver on the promise of affordability, everyday and in every state of the union. Scourge or solution? We'll take a closer look next time around.
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