Social Sense: Practical Approaches to Solving the Housing Crisis

S o c i a l S e n s e : Practical Approaches to Solving the Housing Crisis

Nathan Mickelson

With 3 billion people living in cities today and 5 billion people projected to be living in cities by 2030, the equivalent of creating a 1 million person city per week over the next 13 years, how can designers solve this housing crisis and the future needs of affordability, sustainability, practicality and reproducibility? (2) A rising percentage of the population in the developed world is threatened because they cannot afford the inflating price of housing.

This is not only a result of the financial crisis of 2007, but also of the increasing allure of real estate as investment, of the wage gap, and of factors like AirBnB and other online programs that increasingly deprive attractive cities of their residential spaces. The current lack of affordable residential space is further disenfranchised by the rise in the attractiveness of urban lifestyles and gentrification, where neglected but well-located neighborhoods of ethnically and socially diverse residents are weeded out by large income populations. This development requires constructive resistance that halts the trend toward social segregation in cities by enlivening ideas on affordable housing through new building types, new property development models, renewal and expansion of social housing programs, cautious forms of increasing inner-city density, and renewed, contemporary research into “housing for the minimum subsistence level.� This document seeks to analyze these tenants by putting them through unique, 21st century typologies and arguing for new models of social housing that reflect affordability, sustainability, practicality, and reproduciblity. (4)

INCREMENTAL DESIGN Because the housing shortage worldwide is of great magnitude, Alejandro Aravena argues that the problem will not be able to be solved unless people’s capacity to build and their resources are applied to that of the government and market’s abilities; (1) this “open system” gives the ability to channel all available forces towards a common means in order to make the people become a part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem. (2) That being said, the resources available are, in a lot of case, not enough to inspire action. In order to confront this scarcity of means and resources, the market will both reduce and displace: 1) they will reduce the overall size of the house, which causes a detriment to the quality of life for the residents and 2) they will displace those underprivileged denizens to the outskirts of cities where land prices are significantly cheaper, which further segregates people from the opportunities that brought them to the city initially. Aravena argues that, in order to face this lack of resources and means, “incrementality” should become implemented. (2)

If you can’t do everything, focus on:

What is difficult

What cannot be done individually

What will guarantee the common good

of the future (2)

Aravena has identified 5 conditions as the ABC’s of incremental design: (2)

1) Have a good location, one that is dense enough to be able to pay for the well-located and often expensive site;

2) Develop a system of harmonious growth in time, meaning to build strategically the framework and essentials of the home and framing performance and actions to allow expansion to happen as a personalization through the success of the design, not as a deterioration of the neighborhood in spite of the design.

3) Create a successful urban layout by introducing, between the private lot and public street, collective space in order to maintain social agreements among neighbors.

4) Provide a structure that anticipates the final growth scenario (middle-class), not just the initial one.

5) Plan for a final, middle class scenario of at least 72m2 or 4 bedrooms (3m x 3m) that leaves enough space for closets or double beds, puts bathrooms near the bedrooms, and the possibility of a parking space.

These tenets are trying to achieve a balance of low-rise density with the possibility of expansion and without overcrowding. (2) What follows is are examples of Aravena’s work in Iquique and Constitución, with 2 different designs that follow the same principles and means as the aforementioned process. These projects have been released to the public to allow for an open source, adaptable framework to provide other governments and markets to with the same means to tackle the issue of massive rapid urbanization and rule out any excuse for inaction. These designs may need to be adapted to local codes, materials, and realities, but they have been tested and proved to be beneficial to communities and have been implemented under very stringent budgets and constraints.

ELEMENTAL: QUINTA MONROY Iquique, Chile

The project site was set to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half an hectare in the center of the city of Iquique in northern Chile using a $10,000 subsidy in order to buy the land, which was 3 times more expensive than what social housing can normally afford; provide the infrastructure; and fabricate the homes to ensure that future residents would not have to leave their economic and social networks. (1)(3) The answer was realized in a dual-densification concept: instead of providing inefficient singlefamily homes, a system of row houses with double-stacked units was developed. Future enhancements and expansion by the occupants was the key to the design, the goal being to stay under the budget housing subsidy, and to provide a framework for growing families to easily expand their accommodations by their own volition at any time in the future.

The expansion spaces are an elemental component: they are the solution to uncontrollable sprawl that often happens at such developments.

Components, such as structural walls, partition walls, staircases, kitchens, and bathrooms form the basic finishes in the completed design and are already scaled to anticipate expansion. =Unlike projects of a similar nature, this housing complex is designed to guarantee a rise in value (3) . As a building, it paid for the expensive, welllocated land, and as a home, it expands. The families themselves took the project from the initial public housing units of 40 square meters to the current middle class units of 80 square meters in a matter of weeks. (1)

In the neighborhoods of Constitucion and Chile as a whole, communities are often created informally due to urban sprawl and rapid development coupled with a lack of oversight from heads of communities, causing density to be a detriment to growth and development.This project was created in response to these conditions by proposing "half of a good home" in the same way as the previous project in Iquique to provide a framework for successful densification and customization. (2) The project was commissioned by the Arauco Forest Company who wanted to develop measures to support the employees and contractors of the company by providing access to home ownership, within the context of Chilean housing code, which allowed Elemental to work on the high end of housing policy for the first time. Given a greater abundance of resources, Elemental, instead of taking a cheaper unit and delivering it more finished, applied the same principle of incrementality, but with larger initial and final growth schemes: from an initial 57 meters squared to a final growth of up to 85 meters squared. (2).

ELEMENTAL: VILLA VERDE

Constitucion, Chile

RECYCLING SPACE PARKING SPACES TO LIVING SPACES

When analyzing the global housing deficit from a sustainable lens, the question of grey matter, or total energy required to make something, becomes an important consideration; being able to use what is already available, repurpose it, and expand it can make building more affordable and pragmatic, and there are no more prolific underutilized spaces as the parking lots that dot American cities. An estimated 105 million parking spaces occupy United State’s cities, each consuming one-third of the total available land within a city and roughly half of those are under-used. (5) Parking professionals, structure owners, urban planners, transportation professionals, and architects have analyzed the long-term effects on parking based on technological, mobile, and societal changes, including the suburbanite migration to cities, the millennial lack of driving and car ownership, the car-sharing services' takeover of urban mobility, the increase in autonomous transport, and the push to limit traffic in order to make communities walkable and friendly to pedestrians, which leaves a majority of parking spaces with an uncertain future necessity (6).

From a financial standpoint, not only does parking steal potential real estate, it also squanders potential tax revenue. The University of Connecticut and the Smart State Transportation Initiative, or SSTI, released a pair of studies in April of 2014 that revealed that a single parking lane would cost a city a median of $1000 annually in lost tax revenue. In Hartford, Connecticut, the city would pull in $50 million dollars more in tax revenue if parking lanes were transformed into buildings. This dated theme of “auto-centric zoning requirements� inevitably wastes valuable urban space and dissuades alternative means of transport. (7)

What if, instead of parking lanes, those under-used spaces could be repurposed into something more useful to urban development, such as a housing project?

Within this section are projects designed to convert parking spaces into living spaces, bringing life to the heavily fortified concrete containers and the wide expanses of dead space to propose an efficient, intelligent means of living afforably, sustainably, and practically.

The Star Apartments, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture, opened in October 2014 and are a demographic-specific social housing complex located in Los Angeles' “Skid Row" that supplies to the needs of the long-term homeless. (8)(9) The goal to create interstitial, social links with the neighborhood through a mix of uses was administered to the redevelopment of an existing parking structure.

The apartments provide 102 prefabricated residential units, each around 350 square feet with their own bathroom and kitchen, stacked above the original structure. Numerous staircases and open voids connect to the “open spatial fabric” and offer opportunities to foster contact between residents as well as link to the podium, which provides such amenities as on-site health services, including medical, counseling, and fitness facilities as well as art studios, a shared garden and a jogging path (3)(11).

The accepted demographic for admittance into the housing are members of the “most vulnerable” population within Los Angeles, including those whom are chronically homeless and have a record of frequenting hospitals. (11) Not only is the fusion of social services, shared public spaces and recreational facilities, and public housing a unique building program, but Star Apartments also boasts new and unique construction methods. With limited budget and time, Michael Maltzan Architecture’s solution was to use prefabricated modules and hoist them into place above the existing podium in order to provide higher construction quality, fit stringent construction tolerances, quicken construction time, and meet their ambitious sustainability goal, LEED Platinum.

(12)

"the community that lives [in the Star Apartments] should have a similar environment to anybody that could afford something more expensive." … What we're trying to create is something that feels like a microcosm of the city itself," (10)

It is in the hopes of the architect that Star Apartments will become a model for affordable, sustainable, community living.

MALTZAN: STAR APARTMENTS

Los Angeles, California

a

What is the solution to affordable housing in New York?

In 2014, Mayor de Blasio revealed “Housing New York: A Five Borough, Ten-Year Plan” launching an initiative to build and preserve 200,000 affordable residential units, but how will the plan be implemented? (13)(14) Due to the “crisis of affordability”, Miriam Peterson, Sagi Golan, and Nathan Rich developed a unique way to ease the housing crisis, a new, strategic approach to innercity affordable housing that contrasts the current trend of one-off projects and scattered rezoning methods. (13) (14) They took the dimensions of a parking space, 9ft x 18ft or 162 sf, and used it to develop a matrix to build modular micro-units, the “9 x 18” proposal considers how parking spaces, which are under the regulation of outdated zoning requirements, could be modified into a scheme that encourages mixed housing development in lively neighborhoods with accessible mass transit, public amenities, and active streets. (13) In short, the proposal aims to claim underused land and create viable housing and amenities by combining the discourse on social housing with the citywide issue of parking to solve issue on urbanism, neighborhoods, lifestyle, mobility, and social justice. (13)(14) 9 x 18 is a study of how New York City zoning regulations on parking have manifested into a plethora of underused spaces and offers a challenge the code by proposing new, affordable schemes for housing design. Through this project is the goal to reveal the grand potential of the 20,360,000 sf of surface level parking space within New York City Housing Authority’s land and create strategies for developing this untapped resource. (14) The current regulations surrounding NYCHA lots clashes with the mayor’s pedestrian safety program, disrupts traffic and air quality; and forces developers to spend around $50,000 per parking space according to Furman Center at NYU, inevitably increasing housing costs. By turning the regulation into a commodity, 9 x 18 links the number of necessary parking lanes to the number and size of apartments, their affordability, and distance to transit stations. (13)

RICH PETERSON: 9 x 18 SOCIAL HOUSING

New York City, New York

RICH PETERSON: 9 x 18 SOCIAL HOUSING New York City, New York

The 9 x 18 proposal would allow developers the option to pay into a fund to minimize their required parking spaces further; this fund would pay for mixed-use parking on NYCHA lots and would provide covered garages with retail on the ground level, shared communal playgrounds at the top level, and more space for mixed development on adjacent lots due to consolidation of parking. (13) The project began with a citywide analysis of NYCHA’s surface parking lots to highlight the city’s potential for change. From this, multiple iterations of land development were considered for the project to both minimize the burden of parking requirements on developers and generate revenue, allowing for the preservation of the potential affordable development on NYCHA plots. In addition, these strategic infill developments offer opportunities for stronger integration with the urban fabric and better urban design strategies. (14) The project zooms in on East Harlem to diagram how this intervention could impact the scale of a single building, a city block, and a borough. The proposal aims to consolidate parking into municipal structures to free surface lots for future development, which includes additional affordable units as well as needed resident services, shared facilities, and cultural amenities for NYCHA residents and the surrounding neighborhood. (14) In the long term, the 9 x 18 approach creates new possibilities for affordable, social development and innercity housing and proposes that the people embrace change in order to spark a conversation about urban lifestyle and priorities. (14) This, in turn, will encourage divestment in parking and investment in subsidized housing and community enhancements; advocate diverse, democratic development in under-densified areas; and promote participatory design in subsidized projects. (13)

ABOVE AND BEYOND A common theme among a majority of older, iconic cities is that they have expanded to the point in which they cannot increase their own densities due to height and/or historic regulations. Despite these codes, an influx of people still occurs, resulting in a dissociation of neighborhoods and developments away from the inner-city, ultimately hurting the character of place, the environment, and people's ability to acquire homes close to their work environments.

What if instead of removing or replacing, a building used the space above a building? What if new building occurred on top of the current fabric in order to create a layered vertical history of the city while still preserving the place's iconic qualities?

Within this section is a series of proposals that build out and build above the original context to adapt to the next generation of a city and provide a new system for sustainable inner-city housing development.

FXFowle Architects: 35XV Chelsea, New York

35XV is a condominium complex in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. After prior investors were incapable of closing on the property, the 35XV proposal partnered with Xavier High School to structure a symbiosis between residential and educational. In exchange for using the existing building’s six floors for new high school facilities, 35XV was given air rights to develop a residential tower above the property. (23) Due to this design condition, the residential segment initiates 100 feet above the ground level and rises an additional 24 floors with 170,000 square feet of residential floor space, capping the entire project at 330 feet tall. The residential units include panoramic views, 10’ ceiling heights, and a 10 degree angled window that allows more natural light into the rooms.

(15) (23)

Common amenities in the mixed use tower include a health and fitness center, a 75 foot wide outdoor terrace, a climate-controlled walk-in wine cellar with personal storage for each unit, a lounge for entertainment, a dining room, children’s playroom, and bike storage. (15) Through projects like this, inner-city development can start to occur as an extension of an existing framework, giving cities their entire footprint back through undeveloped rooftops on which to expand and alleviate housing issues.

BIG: TRANSITLAGER Münchenstein, Switzerland

Located in Basel’s Dreispitz neighborhood was the existing “Transitlager”, a concrete warehouse built in the late 1960’s. The project’s goal was to remodel 194,000 sf of existing building and extend with 75,000 sf of additional residential and commercial purposes by building with the industrial logic of the context, which is characterized by the harsh geometries of infrastructure: intersecting rail lines, loading bays, and an amalgamation of linear buildings with pointed corners and staggered street presences. (17) In this framework, an extension extrudes a shiftedbox geometry from the harsh base that is adapted from the original building’s specifications to double the size of the Transitlager; maximize sunlight and views; form unique, communal courtyards with panoramic sightlines to allow “penthouse[s] for the people”; and create the staggered-façade edge with pointed ends that blends with the heterogeneous district. (17) (18) The purpose of the transformation was to build with the aesthetic logic of the neighborhood and incorporate a mixed-use design with a housing component in order to help repurpose an obsolete district into a bustling arts quarter. The method of approach was to strip the interior walls of the 60’s building, use the structure as a frame to reprogram the former warehouse into multifunctional layers and create an extension with minimal intervention to maximize programmatic diversity and feasibility.

(17) (18) This amalgam then becomes a range of ideal spaces: from open and flexible plans to custom units, public programs to private homes, vibrant urban space to tranquil semi-urban gardens, and from cool industrial to warm cozy. (16) (18) Through this intervention, BIG combines art, commerce, work, and living into single, mixed-use hybrid with 24-hour life and energy. (18)

Due to the exorbitant housing prices and lack of open lots to develop, affordable housing is becoming extremely difficult to find in cities such as Paris, especially within the inner city. (22) The 3BOX proposal, designed by Malka Architecture, plans to change this reality by incorporating prefabricated, modular units onto the roofs of existing buildings. (20) “It is necessary to reconsider the city with the logic of transformation: through superposition, addition, and the extension of our built heritage. This means reclaiming territory in the marginalized areas of our cities, with projects that bear insurrection and civic mobilization”. - Stéphane Malka (19) The first iterations of 3BOX sustainable homes are on the rooftop of an old building near the Canal Saint Martin and are built using a steel frame with glass and wooden walls, each unit stacked, within close proximity to one another, and given its own urban garden. (22) These energy-plus, modular systems are flexible and can be extended depending on the user’s needs. (20) To develop a new apartment block in this area would be costly and result in a high rental for tenants, but Stéphane Malka found a way around this.

“The economic crisis has disrupted the building sector. The process of architectural production is costly in time/money and increases the gap between architecture and the needs of citizens. Moreover, it is difficult to speak of “sustainability”when the act of building generates environmental degradation” - Stéphane Malka. (19) Thanks to Paris’ new “la Loi Alur”, a new legislation that allows urban heightening, 3BOX designs have become possible and practical. (20) The process would take place from owner to owner, where the architectural firm leading the project would negotiate with building owners for air rights above their building in order to gain 3BOX sites.

(19) In return for these rights, the architects would pay the building owners in renovation work, offering such services as facade repair and cleanup, structural repair, and/or new amenities such as elevators and insulation. (22) This unique model of business is a low-cost alternative to standard building practices and it allows the cost of these green housing units to be kept at 40 percent below standard market rate. (19) (20) (22) Aside from the affordable aspect, 3BOX units offer a pragmatic approach to urban sprawl because they propose building above the existing context, alleviating space in denser city neighborhoods. (22) In this way, 3BOX anticipates the future by allowing an entire city to develop on top of itself, creating contemporary means to solve the inner city housing crisis.

STEPHAN MALKAN ARCHITECTS: 3BOX

Paris, France

INCREMENTALITY

ADAPTIVE REUSE

VERTICAL EXTENSION

With 3 billion people living in cities today and 5 billion people projected to be living in cities by 2030, buildings need to be designed with anticipitated growth in mind.

Through incrementality, adaptive reuse, and vertical extension, architecture can solve the housing crisis by planning for additional density before urban sprawl has a chance to disrupt social and economic order.

Works Cited (1) Aravena, Alejandro. "My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process."

TED. October 2014. Lecture (2) Aravena, Alejandro. ELEMENTAL. ELEMENTAL Architecture, 2013

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Expanded Edition. Birkhäuser Verlag, 2011.

(4) Heckmann, Oliver, and Friederike Schneider. Floor Plan Manual For Housing: 5th Revised and

Expanded Edition. Birkhäuser Verlag, 2017.

(5) Ben-Joseph, Eran. Rethinking a Lot. MIT Press, 2012.

(6) Pandya, Sanjay. Adaptive Reuse. International Parking Institute, 2016. PDF. (7) Burns, Rebecca. Multistory Car Park in US Transformed into Designer Micro Apartments

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jul/09/multistorey-car-park-us-designer-micro-apartments-affordable-housing.

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