Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [26]
A house and business on a single mortgage: live/work units at Seaside
The backyard granny flat: a bedroom that has been liberated from the confines of the house
The final advantage of the outbuilding is the flexibility that it provides to household structure. In our society, which values both community and privacy but provides few alternatives between those two extremes, the outbuilding allows an extended family to live together and apart at the same time. How many middle-aged couples would reconsider opening their house to a widowed in-law or a grown child if they could only give them their own little apartment in the backyard?
In Charleston, South Carolina, the right way to do affordable housing: few in number and stylistically similar to middle-class homes nearby
TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Affordable housing, while seldom in the headlines, remains a crisis in the United States. Several lessons can be learned from America’s long history of housing its poor, and if these lessons are surprisingly obvious, then it is all the more surprising how routinely they are ignored.
Above all, affordable housing should not look different from market-rate housing. The last thing the poor need is a home that stigmatizes them as such, when all they really want is what they perceive the middle class already has. The problem is that the poor, who are presumed to be grateful to have any home at all, have been the object of fifty years of architectural and planning experimentation. With the best intentions, designers have responded to the affordable-housing challenge with the very latest in untested technology and style. The resulting buildings—what the critic Robert Campbell calls “billboards of indigence”—are often so laden with weird architectural notions that they look ridiculously out of place. This problem is only compounded by the fact that the poor themselves have until recently been largely absent from the design process, and thus unable to exert much influence on the outcome. aa So, Rule #1: Don’t experiment on the poor; they have no choice. Experiment on the rich, who can always move out.
The second rule of affordable housing, so often ignored, is that it should not be concentrated in large quantities. Rather, it should be distributed among market-rate housing as sparsely as possible in order to avoid neighborhood blight and reinforce positive behavior.ab Probably the most costly error of federal housing policy in the 1960s and ’70s was the massive relocation of poor people into terrifying public housing ghettos, many of which still exist today, with disastrous social consequences.
When it comes to the integration of different housing types, there is no established formula, but it seems safe to say that a neighborhood can easily absorb a one-in-ten insertion of affordable housing without adverse effects. In the image of Annapolis pictured earlier, this ratio would place the pair of town houses among twenty larger houses—hardly a threat. Such a distribution provides role models for the poor while mitigating against the close-mindedness of the wealthy. The one-in-ten approach is gaining favor, but it must overcome a long tradition of government sponsored mega-projects. It is a difficult point to argue when the economies of scale suggest that housing can most efficiently be provided in bulk, like canned peas or paper towels. That may be true, but only in a simplistic analysis. Reducing the cost per unit of affordable housing in this way violates the larger goal of the housing program, which is to provide not just housing but viable places to live. Such places include a social support system; in other words, a community.
The tendency toward dangerous accumulations of affordable housing is unfortunately reinforced by the private development industry, which would prefer to see