Multi-Family Housing Design: Entering the 21st Century
by Mike Pyatok
Published in Introduction to Multifamily Housing
Edited by Michael Crosbie
2003
The Context of Housing Production
The production of housing is an integral part of American culture, reflecting all of its social, economic and political complexities as they vary from region to region. This rich texture of the U.S. cultural landscape is probably the reason its housing industry has never succeeded in establishing a system of centralized production. Housing production in the U.S. is highly fragmented among about 55,000 builder/developers, of whom nearly 80% produce less than 20 units a year, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Some see this as inefficient, with production each year falling behind the growing need. Others see fragmentation as a blessing, possessing the potential to respond to the unique mixture of local demographic preferences, history, climate and available labor and material resources.
Others may argue that ‘inefficient’ production leading to a shortfall of housing is a matter of political perspective. To this view, each year we produce more than enough housing for our citizens, at least in area, but with too many receiving homes of 10,000 square feet or more, and too many receiving too little to meet their needs, and some receiving none at all, according to HUD. The problem is not that we under-produce, it is that we unevenly distribute what we produce, because housing production occurs within a market economy notorious for not achieving an equitable distribution of resources. So housing production is a sociopolitical enterprise with all of its attending frictions, whether in inner cities with gentrification caused in part by returning wealth, or in suburbs with environmental and agricultural degradation resulting from ever-expanding circles of wealth on-the-run.
The recent affliction of SUV’s in personalized transportation has been accompanied, if not been preceded, by the ‘SUV-ization’ of homes like mega-houses, of retail outlets like Walmart, and now even of art museums like the Guggenheim’s proposal for a site on Manhattan’s East River. Our patterns of consumption, settlement, transportation and habitation are intertwined with the poverty of other nations. Until we as a nation experience the daily pinch of limited resources like most of the rest of humanity, whose resources and labor we have been exploiting, we will not understand why we are so despised as a nation, and why the days of our present lifestyle are finite.
Architects and Housing Design
Architects and their various design ideologies are deeply embedded in these patterns of housing production and consumption. The pursuit of superficial fashion and useless novelty is the cultural justification for unending consumption in market economies, and the architectural profession has not been immune to this tendency. Sponsors of high profile cultural or commercial symbols, working with budgets freed from the worries of rigorous financial feasibility nearly always encountered by multifamily housing, often tolerate and encourage a whimsical pursuit of novelty to attract attention. These trophy buildings make architecture extremely vulnerable to the pursuit of novelty for its own sake and encourage its practice to weave itself into a seamless union with the fashion industry.
In the housing industry, custom homes for the wealthy often share the budgetary freedom of high profile trophy buildings, and often qualify as ‘real architecture’ as defined by today’s fashion industry. On the other hand, the requirements of multifamily housing thrust architects deeply into the sociopolitical and economic malaise outlined above. Budgets are rarely ‘fat,’ except for high-density luxury living, so exotic novelty is a privilege for only a few. High-end, trophy buildings for commercial or cultural purposes may occasionally cause a cultural teapot tempest in their pursuit of fashionable novelty. But the design of whole new communities on the urban edge or the transformation of existing ones near the urban center can stir up many environmental and class conflicts, if not race and ethnic frictions, that reach regional if not national proportions. Faced with this level of potential resistance, no wonder then that multifamily housing is often accused of being too conservative by the design subculture.
So whether architects like it or not, multifamily housing, along with its frequent companion of community or neighborhood planning, often forces them to confront many of our society’s most pressing problems. From the viewpoint of a practitioner, I see these classified as environmental, cultural, social and economic, and only lastly, technological.
Environmental Issues
Multifamily housing, by its sheer size and impact, often consumes land and material resources in quantities that people perceive as large when compared to other additions to their communities. While not necessarily approaching the perceived impacts of highways, shopping centers, big-box retail, or dump yards, they can stir emotions when former open spaces begin to shrink or other cherished natural or revered resources seem to be threatened. Too much of post-World War II sprawl has justified the public’s fear of new developments. But even in this day, protests are intense when more enlightened developments build closer to existing infrastructure, in more compact patterns, preserve and restore wetlands and other natural conditions, or attempt to be ‘green,’ and even seek to introduce and support public transit. While sometimes justified, the resistance too often seems selfishly focussed on preserving existing conditions for those now living in the contested location. Americans cherish expanding their families, but too often are unwilling or unable to make the connection between the growth required in their communities caused by the offspring that they are producing in their own bedrooms.
Under these circumstances, architects, landscape architects, land planners, and their developer-clients must work miracles with designs that are more sensitive to environmental and historic conditions. Their work must be guided by informed, careful political maneuvering, and hopefully, by sincere public education campaigns and participatory design processes that genuinely incorporate public opinion while at the same time informing it. When dealt with openly an honestly, people can become wiser and more generous, both to the environment and the needs of each emerging generation looking for places to live. Architects need to be critical players in that education process, both in the design and planning phase, and in the quality of the resulting product, which while in use, continues that public education process for years afterwards.
Cultural Issues
It is our fate as humans to develop irrational attachments to places and quite often, communities have formed in places where humans should never have settled, resulting in self-destructive patterns from a sustainable perspective. Yet generations have made these places home, leaving behind buildings and places that became endeared symbols of theirs and their ancestors’ aspirations and dreams. These are realities that developers and their design teams cannot ignore when designing to suit the images of domesticity and the sense of history that intangibly combine in a region’s memories and built forms. Avant garde experiments in novelty for its own sake when applied to multifamily housing succumb to the pressures of mainstream design publications. When inserted into the complex cultural conditions of an existing community, they can often cause a hatred for more compact developments with higher densities and diverse incomes, so necessary for saving a region’s natural and cultural heritage.
As long as multifamily housing designers recognize that their larger mission is to convince Americans that they should be living at higher densities, with mass transit, in smaller dwellings and in mixed-use/mixed-income communities to conserve land, energy and resources, and maybe even bridge some class and race divides, then they should feel no guilt for eschewing avant garde fashion in order to accomplish these longer-term and more radical contributions to social change. Designing imagery to help induce structural changes in the culture that will prolong the life of the planet for everyone, far outweighs the short-term purposes of using design to change consumer preferences for superficial appearances cherished by the design subculture and fashion industry.
Once again, as with the environmental issues, design teams must recognize that community design is an intense cultural enterprise and must be collective and inclusive. They need to develop sophisticated, hands-on group design processes to facilitate public participation in the planning and design of multifamily housing and community development beyond the crude, and often unproductive, series of after-the-fact public hearings and environmental impact reports. These are bureaucratic responses too late in the process, when design has been established, the developer’s goals set, trust has become impossible and communities feel they have only the heavy hand of government regulation to protect themselves. All parties must share, from the very beginnings of a design, in that mutual education process between those who hold the long view of environmental and cultural impacts, those who hold the local, and sometimes self-serving view, and those with the shortest view seeking immediate profits from a real estate deal. Designers can facilitate that process of engagement if they focussed their sense of poetry and idealism on designing methods that steer community building as a creative, collective enterprise, at grassroots levels in the earliest stages of a project.
While speed and efficiency are critical to housing production, avoiding the collective design process will only delay production in the long run. The cumulative resistance to change by communities confronting stubborn, self-serving developers will only feed their belief that they are the victims of private profit, often in collusion with local government support. This becomes an immutable inertial force against all growth, self righteously stubborn and ignorant to the values of intelligent growth that may underlie some development proposals. Recognizing that local populations need to be treated as partners in development at the very beginning of design, developers’for-profit, non-profit, and public alike’will in the long run improve the climate for achieving higher densities, more compact, mixed-use, and mixed-income communities.
Social and Economic Issues
For all its rhetoric about equality, freedom, and justice the U.S. is fundamentally a deeply divided class society, accentuated by racial and ethnic prejudices. The hope is that, because we continue to extol the virtues of these high principles and keep them at least within our peripheral vision as a nation, we will continue to chip away at the barriers that prevent us from achieving them. Multifamily housing is one more arena within which the struggle to achieve those goals gets a serious workout. Affordable housing, a euphemism for government-assisted housing intended for households whose incomes are too low to pay for market-driven housing, demands special attention by designers.
Stereotypical views about lower-income Americans and fears by homeowners about property values, often get disingenuously expressed as fears about increased traffic, impacts on schools or the environment, and rising crime in the streets. While there are deep familial and societal problems caused by the steady loss of better-paying manufacturing jobs and their replacement by low-paying service jobs, often those with the better paying jobs of the new economy harbor misperceptions about their less fortunate fellow Americans victimized by these macro-economic shifts.
It may be asking too much for housing design and neighborhood planning to mellow out the resistance harbored by the middle classes toward mixed income communities. Yet, when exquisitely designed with a reverence for the local natural and cultural ecology, executed with a sense of poetry, multi-family housing design for lower income households can throw off balance even the most hardened bigots. They then must resort to complaints about traffic and school impacts to hide their more deeply seated feelings about the future residents. But in any community there are those who, if plagued by doubt, are willing at least to listen to new ideas and beliefs, if they are presented with honesty, trust, and openness by developers and their design teams. The design process can be structured upon foundations of designers’ and developers’ personable behavior with no hidden agendas from private or government sources, utilizing transparent participatory design tools.
Separation by economic class, exacerbated by race and ethnicity, will not dissipate quickly. But as long as economically disadvantaged households are short-changed by poor design and planning fueled by under-investment, their communities will be shunned and their offspring stigmatized. However, sometimes help from the design community can do more harm than good. Too often the design professions believe that lower income communities need to be served with the same types of housing as middle income communities to convey a sense of justice. This is where the social and economic divide can have unforeseen negative consequences. For example, in reaction to the industrialization of the early-20th century, the middle classes came to shape their communities as bucolic retreats from places of work, embracing zoning as a tool to create solely residential neighborhoods cleansed of the many trades and services provided by the under-classes. Years later, middle-class reformists wanting to provide equality of design, sought to improve public housing through the HOPE VI program so its neighborhoods and appearances would look more like theirs. But codes and regulations, whether post-World War II or recent traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs), have systematically made life more difficult for those who need to use their homes as income-producing workshops, stores, or headquarters for other forms of entrepreneurial activity that do not fit the tidy model of domestic retreat.
Those households not benefiting from today’s economy face similar survival necessities as their American forebears did as colonists, pioneers, or immigrants. With no markets available, colonists and pioneers alike had to design and build new communities whole cloth, using their homes as homesteads, with no bureaucracies monitoring and regulating their every action. Immigrants at the turn of the last century often faced similar conditions, closed out of the local economy by language and discrimination. They erected flourishing local economies using their domiciles to build family-based businesses. Today’s underclasses face insurmountable regulatory obstacles not experienced by those in the past because they did not exist then. Those obstacles are built into zoning and building codes, insurance policies, lending practices and property management attitudes that, while ostensibly protecting the health and safety of everyone, too often stifle the entrepreneurial urges of struggling families in the lower economic quartile. Such families often must simply break the law and hope that authorities do not notice or look the other way as they press portions of their homes into uses disallowed by local zoning ordinances or building codes.
A fresh and more creative look needs to be taken at what the definition of home and mixed-use ought to be, of course with an eye towards health and safety issues. But given today’s stringent fire codes, many uses presently excluded by zoning from residential neighborhoods could be reinstated. Alley-served neighborhoods offer opportunities for messy private backsides with manicured public front sides. If special fire separations were introduced between front and back portions of alley-served housing, perhaps the back half of a home could entertain such semi-industrial uses as auto repair, appliance repair, sheet-metal assembly, cabinet making, tee-shirt silkscreening, computer assembly, clothing manufacturing, even small restaurants with home cooking by invitation or reservation only.
Technological Issues
Every generation of architects dreams of that technological silver bullet that will lower the cost of housing, like a medical breakthrough overcoming a centuries-old disease. But this technological mindset always ignores the highly volatile ‘soft’ costs of housing. Some of the soft costs like the cost of land, the interest on construction loans or permanent financing, and the profit margins of developers are all vulnerable to market conditions and can jump up unexpectedly, neutralizing and even reversing any cost reductions resulting even from major technological breakthroughs. The hard costs of construction (labor and materials) constitute about 60 to 70% of the total production costs of housing, and depending on developers’ profit margins and market conditions, total production costs may represent only 50% of final sales prices. Assume that a major new construction method’some combination of the execution process and material improvements’could lower production costs by as much as 10%. This may represent only a 5% reduction in sales prices, if the developer decides to pass the savings on, and just a half-percent jump in the mortgage interest rate could wipe out that savings.
Does this mean architects are wasting their time in seeking technological improvements in production that shorten construction time and material costs’ Not necessarily, since non-profit corporations do pass on the savings from technological breakthroughs and this can benefit their production of affordable housing. But single family infill homes produced by non-profits for first time buyers can more easily benefit from innovative systems than multifamily attached housing. Detached homes are less constrained by fire codes than multifamily housing. Many panelized systems of production cannot prove they have one-hour, fire-rated resistance to meet the regulatory demands of higher density attached construction, and insurance and lending policies are fearful of innovation in a highly litigious society.
Manufactured housing may claim that it is less expensive than conventionally built housing, but closer examination may yield other explanations. The HUD code which governs manufactured housing is more liberal than the UBC. Also, most of the labor in the manufactured housing industry speaks English as a second language, being relatively recent immigrants located in non-metropolitan areas and, of course, it is not unionized. The controlled conditions of the roofed plant and the careful management of material consumption notwithstanding, these policies governing codes and labor are probably the most important factors contributing to lowered costs in the manufactured housing industry. Recent efforts to move into higher density urban markets with attached versions of manufactured housing may prove helpful to non-profits supplying affordable housing in those regions, but its production within plants located in rural areas will not help the local economies and construction trades in the areas where the housing is needed.
Conclusion
So what should be the main focus of architects’ talents’ As noted earlier, designing and conducting the process for public participation in housing design and community planning to help change both public opinion and that of client-developers, is essential to bring about the cultural shifts needed for some very important design innovations. These innovations include smaller units, higher densities, more compact communities with more realistic parking and road standards, mixed-use and mixed-income communities designed to easily accept public transit, energy efficient strategies that utilize greener materials and systems. Some of these will contribute to lowering first-time costs but some may even raise first-time costs. But what is ultimately most important, if all are employed, they will lower the long-term costs to us as a society and to the rest of humanity, who will in ever increasing numbers continue to occupy this planet along with us, and with whom we must share its diminishing resources.
It is that special skill of the architect to bring a compelling sense of poetry to these innovations such that the most hardened skeptics, entrenched in today’s self-centered values, might at least turn their heads and admit, ‘well, that really isn’t half bad after all’. At least that would be a beginning, and in today’s world of entrenched ideologies, that would amount to a major environmental, social, cultural, economic and technological breakthrough.