Affordable Style

New York City is awash in new residential building projects known as Affordable Housing, driven by Mayor De Blasio's push for 200,000 new or preserved affordable apartments and the need for middle class and lower income people to remain in the City. Architecture firms in NYC are building entire practices around this mandate. For years, actually, large swaths of the Bronx and Brooklyn are being rebuilt with new, publically financed structures. Due to various forces having to do with finances, regulations and a shear lack of imagination, these buildings blend together into a bland, predictable housing stock that adds little to the local community except for clean and decent places to live, no small task.

But I ask, why does New York’s affordable housing have to look “affordable”? The attributes of this “style” are typical – the cheaper “jumbo” red brick, the horizontal stripes of contrasting brick, and the same relentless under-scaled windows. It has a mean-spirited look and its everywhere. It is creating a city of no character, no identity except an identity of scarcity.

I believe everyone deserves inspired and innovative design and it’s our job as architects to test the limits of what can be done in this building type. Otherwise we are conveying the message that lower income people don’t really matter, and neighborhoods in outlying areas don’t matter either, and they do. With some ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and most of all, empathy, we can raise the bar of affordable housing design significantly, as it is in many other parts of the country and the world. Being in the midst of this building type now, we at think! understand how hard it is to negotiate innovation and quality within the confines of public agencies and their demands to maximize unit count and minimize construction budgets, all within an over-heated construction market. We understand the pressure that puts on architects to produce the same predictable outcomes – the lowest common denominator. But we can’t settle for that. We have to do better. Achieving quality and innovation in affordable housing is really hard – but is not a factor of high budgets. It’s a matter of imagination. And that's our job.