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Monday, November 24, 2003
Could 'Affordable' Housing Be Well-Designed -- And Green?
Neal Peirce, Special to Stateline.org
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Affordable housing has been called a noble cause with a bad reputation. Everyone is for letting less-wealthy people have a roof over their heads. But too often people equate ``affordable'' with ``ugly,'' opposing worker housing out of fear it will diminish their own home's value. Result: We constantly reinforce the barriers of race, culture and class that divide us. Millions of lower-income Americans eke out rent payments consuming close to half their income, or are obliged to commute long distances and endure overcrowded, drafty or even unsafe housing.
So what could a museum -- the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. -- ever do about this?
A lot, it turns out. SECCA's curator, David J. Brown, germinated the idea of a national competition for design of single-family houses that would be (1) affordable, (2) attractively designed -- so that more neighborhoods will accept them -- and (3) made with the environmentally friendly materials and designs of ``green'' technology.
The only requirement was that the dimensions be modest, along the lines for three- and four-bedroom houses developed by Habitat for Humanity.
If an idea and its time were ever made for each other, this was it. The architectural competition, with a very modest $15,000 award, was announced on the Internet Sept. 1, 2002. Quickly, Bank of America agreed to finance awards for multiple design winners. Architects and designers were given a deadline of Feb. 1, 2003. No less than 804 registrations, from all across the United States and 16 other countries, poured in.
And a month later, with actual entries due, there were 422 designs, each described and illustrated on a 24-by-36-inch pitch board.
Some of the award winners were visionary -- for example, Beth Blostein's ``Gradient House'' with a polycarbonate panel skin over a greenhouse frame with a digital fabricated central wall made from recycled plastics to house duct work, wiring runs, closets and even appliances.
Architect Steven Raike of Bear Creek, Pa., suggested putting a three-story home on the ``free'' real estate atop an existing industrial building, with one side of the structure sporting a billboard to help offset mortgage payments.
Architect S. Flavio Espinoza, by contrast, produced a design marrying traditional ``Southern'' architecture with modernism. His butterfly roof is designed to capture rainwater for both heating and cooling. Wooden shutters to protect south-facing walls of the house from the hot sun employ a hanging track system that residents can control manually.
But how to turn any of this into reality? The catalyst has been Winston-Salem's longtime impresario of the arts, R. Philip Hanes Jr., a founder of the North Carolina School of the Arts and a founding director of the National Endowment for the Arts. With Hanes' prompting, SECCA's Brown has teamed up with Gary Green, the visionary president of Forsyth Community Technical College, and with members of a Winston-Salem Housing Partnership that is anxious to launch affordable housing projects.
Result: This semester architecture students at Forsyth are taking the design by Espinoza and turning it into plans that construction crews can follow. Next semester, Forsyth's carpentry, plumbing, electricity, horticulture and heating-air conditioning students will build the house on an infill site close to the city center.
After that, there's talk of building a series of the new designs in the Happy Hill Gardens community of south-central Winston-Salem, the city's oldest African-American neighborhood.
Still, there are bundles of unanswered questions to be faced -- about materials and construction costs, alternative designs, actual energy consumption and more. Innovative materials may pose cost problems. Quality insulation may reduce long-term costs -- but push up original construction outlays. In many communities the toughest problem may be to find affordable land parcels except at urban fringe spots, far from jobs and opportunities.
Plus there's still some resistance within Habitat for Humanity, an organization high on heart though critics say too willing to settle for cookie-cutter housing.
But the Winston-Salem partners are psyched up about building more houses and sparking a regional, maybe even a national wave of experimentation with houses that fulfill Brown's original vision: inventive design, energy efficiency, environmental consciousness, cost effectiveness -- creating ``inspired living space usually reserved for the more affluent.''
We do know that good design can lift the stigma from low-income housing -- a proposition Joseph Riley of Charleston, S.C., ``America's design mayor,'' proved years ago with assisted housing so attractive it blends practically invisibly into downtown Charleston's quality streets.
And with Phil Hanes' evangelism, the rest of the country will be hearing about the Winston-Salem experiment. Hanes is already targeting the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Economic Development Administration as logical government bodies to spark a nationwide wave of emulations of the experiment begun in Winston-Salem.
``This is an arts-driven, design-driven effort with immense national implications,'' insists Hanes.
Who's to disagree?
Neal Peirce's e-mail address isnrp@citistates.com.
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