Affordable Housing: An Option for Professional Practice?
by Mike Pyatok
Oculus, AIANY Design Magazine
Fall 2003

The mission statement for Pyatok Architects simply states its commitment to designing durable, attractive affordable housing for lower income communities, which also fosters smart growth through higher density, mixed-use development within inner cities and suburbs. We also help communities prepare redevelopment strategies and urban design plans for future development. Our methods include and encourage the participation of clients, neighbors, residents and professional peers to ensure the highest quality and most appropriate designs for the communities involved. We generally work with non-profit corporations providing a useful service to society. Special attention is paid to projects designed for populations with extraordinary needs: all such as households with lower incomes, and special populations such as seniors, people transitioning from homelessness, people living with HIV, people with mental or emotional disabilities, and various types of children’s facilities.

At times our work serves private developers if we believe their work will improve the quality of life for all members of the community, demonstrate progressive development strategies, and seek to achieve excellence in architecture. We have also expanded to university student housing and faculty housing.

But how to accomplish all of this and run an officework as a business is not always easy in a country whose dedication to these issues is tentative and unpredictable at best. How to run an architectural office as a business, in general, is not a requirement for licensing and is something that most practicing architects learn by the seat of their pants. To pursue this niche is even more of a challenge. Perhaps it is best that theway so that formative years of schooling are spent focused on ideals about what the world could be like at its best, and not how too often it really is, at its worst. If we all knew prematurely how bad things can really be in business, the drop-out rate from this profession would be even greater than what it is. And it is probably the reason why some extraordinarily beautiful places and socially significant places become the legacy of our profession---they often were not conceived as sound business decisions and more often than not were financial losses for the architects.

And so it is with the design of ‘affordable housing’. This is a catch-all phrase that really encompasses a wide range of professional activities that could include anything from concocting economic development strategies in low-income communities, to helping to organize protests against absentee slumlords, to facilitating large community meetings addressing neighborhood-wide planning strategies, to helping communities envision alternative future uses for valuable sites fancied by marauding big-box retailers or developers serving REITs, to pressing elected politicians to take more seriously the housing needs of lower income communities. And yes, last but not least, is the strenuous effort to design the most extraordinary places in which people can live, in spite of the budgets that may prevent that from happening. None of the above, when taken alone or together, is a profit-making enterprise.

The work of Pyatok Architects stretches across this spectrum of activities. Even without this the partial list of ‘meta’-activities mentioned above that precede or parallel the creation of affordable housing, (which and may be considered the domainassigned to the tasks of planning or advocacy), the core of architectural services we engage in to produce well-designed affordable housing nearly always requires an amount of labor that far exceeds the available fees. As our firm grew in size to 25 people, with offices in Oakland and Seattle, staffed more and more by people under 40 facing skyrocketing costs of living in the Bay Area and Seattle, financial sacrifice could not be expected of them, as they had of the founder and original staff, who bought into these regions at earlier and somewhat easier prices.

To face this reality we hired a management consultant who specializes in A/E firms, who examined and diagnosed our firm a couple of years ago, and told us that, while he admired our work and products, of the 400 or so firms he advises, we were 400th on his list in financially stability. We were not certain whether to puff our chests with pride and see this as a badge of honor because, last we looked, our doors were still open, or to cry because we were failing our younger staff. If ‘social responsibility’ does not pay their rent, then we cannot be of much help to those who are in much worse shape if we folded.

We applied the usual efficiency principles, like reducing the constant distracting chatter in the work place which was eroding our fees, not an easy task among people who like to talk politics, whether about local projects or national priorities, and to cut down personal emails and web surfing during office hours. But diversification of work became the emerging solution to stabilizing income, with university housing and developer housing balancing the affordable housing. These new projects have become about 25% of the firm’s income and are still growing. While they have improved the office’s financial picture, they do present challenges for the culture of the office. When totally focused on working with, and in, lower income communities, our communications with non-profit developers and local community residents made our mission clear, and our attitudes focused on the mission statement.

As the clients change, even only modestly, personal daily connection to those most in need diminishes. Conversations, values and the focus of attention around the office change to those clients who are not suffering in their daily survival. This reduced sense of urgency and an emerging isolation from the daily stress of others’ lives, transforms the goals of some of the staff to be more conventionally concerned about themselves, their personal and professional advancement, their compensation and benefits, and less about a social cause much larger than themselves.

This is the challenge for the next phase of Pyatok Architects’ history: how to keep a sense of the original mission as we expand the base of clients. The new clients cannot be slighted, or treated with less attention because they are in less need, but the clients serving the poor and working class communities also cannot be given any less attention because the newer clients can pay more. Most importantly, keeping the staff connected to the daily life of the working poor, in spite of our professional cocoon, is the most challenging goal. This cannot all be done solely in the office environment, but staff can be reminded of their volunteer obligations. Where they choose to live can keep them inserted within these issues, and the extent to which they get engaged in their local community advocacy can keep the fires burning.

All architectural firms are socially engaged in one form or another. Serving those with less economic or social clout is no more deserving of praise than any other firm doing its best to improve the condition of our overall environment and the lives of the general public. Those of us who choose the former simply have to do it with fewer resources, but then again, we learn many lessons form our clients and the residents, who get by on far less than we. When put into that perspective, we have it easy.