Affordable = high utilization

Affordable does not have to be crammed. It could be quite spacious. However, it must be highly utilized. The lower the income, the better the space utilization. To explore this, let’s take the mansion typology again, apply financial pressure, and see what it does to programming. As income drops, two things happen to the program.

• Offloading. First, the building sheds some superfluous program back into the public domain. So, if you had a bar or a movie room, you would have to get these functions outside your house. Luckily, they will be better. If your in-laws are in town, they’ll stay in a hotel, also probably for the better.

• Folding, sliding, hosting. Whatever program remains becomes efficient. The dining room and breakfast nook fold into the kitchen. The sitting and great rooms fold into the living room. A wall between a kitchen and a living room will disappear, turning into a sliding boundary and allowing one room's program to expand at the expense of another, and vice versa. If some in-laws refuse to get a hotel, the kitchen-living room may host a guest bedroom program for a couple of days.

Fun fact. Mansions are no strangers to program hosting either. “I’ve started a business in my garage” simply means that the garage hosted an office or a manufacturing program until it grew enough to exit.

***

No program disappeared under financial pressure. The shape changed, and access became trickier, but nothing disappeared. Be mindful of any constraints you impose that get in the way of sliding, folding, or hosting a program. This may significantly undercut the program and even make some uses impossible.

A classic example is a C-shaped kitchen counter. This innocent-looking move traps square footage and restricts it to kitchen circulation use only.

Conclusion: The low-income residents can’t afford an underutilized area. Any use that can't happen in the unit would have to be acquired off-site, for extra cost, making the unit less affordable to live in.

Affordable = mixed-use

Affordable = high utilization extends to zoning. Low-income residents will always struggle with single-use, underutilized assets, so putting them in a single-use, underutilized R-zoning will hamstring them. Some militant urbanists argue that R zoning hamstrings everyone, regardless of income, but high-income individuals could, as always, offset the disadvantages with their higher income. Meanwhile, low-income individuals will bear the full weight of the same disadvantages, such as driving to all amenities, which is both time-consuming and costly. Again, we face equality over equity.

Conclusion: Affordable housing must be zoned to allow the highest degree of land utilization—mixed-use, or Mx. Alternatively, an R-zone community could have an Mx perimeter that is easily accessible by foot.

Affordable = flexible

Anything is flexible if we throw enough money at it. We don’t have the luxury of money in low-income communities. Flexible in a low-income community means easily alterable with minimal investment.

Let’s say, despite building a human anthill and zoning it as R, we failed to crush the community’s entrepreneurial spirit. The community rezoned into Mx and decided to convert the first floor into businesses to serve the community. They’ll quickly discover that there is a mountain of unnecessary architectural constraints they must reckon with, such as:

• Detachment from the street. The building is set deep in the lot, with an underutilized green zone between it and the street. Street frontage won’t happen. No function of the businesses and amenities will reach the sidewalk. We end up with an overgrown sidewalk nobody wants to walk on and an invisible business facade, both of which negatively impact profitability.

• High First Floors. As if a setback from the street wasn’t enough, the first floor is 5’ off the ground. The front door of an apartment complex has a sprawling ADA-compliant ramp, which no one likes, including ADA users. Such ramps create an added barrier between the customer and the business.

• Hard-to-alter facades. Any alterations to the facades, if possible, are difficult and costly. They were designed with no other use in mind except looking out of a narrow window at uninspired scenery.

• Alterations to rentals. Fit-outs and significant alterations are common in commercial rentals, but not in residential rentals. The alteration potential in residential rentals is limited to a coat of paint and furniture layout, which poses a problem for people who want to run their businesses from home.

In other words, low-income residents face a needless quarter-million-dollar barrier before they spend a single dollar on the business itself.

Low-income communities already face enough constraints because of their income level. The examples above could be easily canceled out with cost-neutral design moves. For example, all ground-floor units could have been a town-home format. That would both maximize the number of units per lot (a frequent starting requirement of human anthills) and allow an easy residential-to-commercial switch if needed.

Conclusion: Every design move in a low-income community must allow more uses of the space instead of limiting it to a single use. Affordable housing must remove, not pose, constraints and permit the maximum degree of functional flexibility.

Affordable = Fostering Community

“Fostering community " has firmly established itself as a meaningless marketing term. Most design moves that claim to foster community do nothing or even have a negative effect on it.

Social interactions inside Profit Machine are made from three ingredients: occasion, location, and money. In other words, if you plan to foster community in your project, you must answer three questions: why do people meet, where do they meet, and how much it costs them in time and money.

High-income individuals have the privilege of having disposable income and time to create dedicated socialization occasions in remote locations. For example, a standard middle-class social interaction might involve getting in your car and driving 30 minutes to eat tapas, each costing as much as a whole meal. The higher the income, the more expensive and remote the occasions, and the more money you must spend to be a part of your social circle.

In low-income communities, with little disposable income and time, dedicated socialization occasions happen less frequently. A long commute is out of the question; such occasions must be as close to the residences as possible, ideally directly adjacent. Beyond that, most social interactions in low-income communities happen spontaneously as part of daily routines. In other words, their socializations overlap with other aspects of their lives, so they have a high utilization of time (echoing the high utilization of space from above).

When we attempt to foster a low-income community, we do so with a high-income bias, expecting their lives to be as compartmentalized as ours: work here and play over there, all at a dedicated time. Such low time utilization is unaffordable.

Fostering a low-income community means first providing opportunities for spontaneous social interaction.

Spontaneous social interactions can lead to planned social interactions in the future.

The danger of lacking community

Fostering community in a low-income area is the most important aspect of affordable design. Without a community, opportunities, and something to do, we are leaving a void for a dangerous entity: a gang (which stands for community) dealing (which stands for opportunities) drugs (which stand for something to do). A gang dealing drugs won’t take root in Beverly Hills, not because people of Beverly Hills are morally superior, but because the value proposition of the gang is weak there, as they have community, opportunities, and plenty to do.

A tight community also helps deal with inevitable interpersonal friction. Low-income residents are locked in stiff competition over the crumbs that fall out of the Profit Machine (80% of the population competes for 20% of assets). Friction is inevitable, and if we are not careful, it will be all they have.

Proposed Solution: Middle Housing

With this framework in mind, what does affordable housing look like? It looks like medium density, the elusive missing middle, the old urban fabric that evolved over 11,000 years. Why is it missing? Because it got run over by XX-century architectural experimentation.

Experimentation and bold moves are only ethical if they are well-researched and evidence-based. 

If they are not, somebody will have an ethics lecture about you a century later.

I don't think old urban fabric was adequately researched before it got discarded. Once we took it apart and reassembled it to fit the predominant ideology at the time, we left a lot of important pieces on the cutting table, then discarded them in the recycling bin. The price we pay to this day goes beyond an affordability crisis. Empty downtowns, car-dependency, unwalkable cities, countless small businesses dying off, loss of ways to connect with each other - the list is endless.

Unfortunately, we make the same mistake today. Slums and missing-middle housing rose from the dead despite everything. It is ugly, but it works. We keep demolishing it and replacing it with pretty housing that doesn't work. Middle housing gives us another chance to learn it properly, and we should take it. I showed many examples of what informed slum improvements look like, from a simple grid solution to middle housing allowing the slum program on the ground floor. Sadly, most slum improvement projects aren't informed or downright negligent.

We, today's generation, didn't kill middle housing; we just inherited the world where it's missing. However, it's up to us to bring it back. It's not fair, but nobody else is qualified to do it.

DODGING PITFALLS

Middle housing ticks all the boxes, but it is not a silver bullet. We must avoid many pitfalls.

• VE Scheme. Middle housing solves the VE affordability scheme by leaving no room for marketing theater, which makes it hard to inflate prices. Also, no space for an elevator, a critical marketing support piece.

  • Fun Fact: A common way to kill middle housing is to unite two of them by inserting an elevator in the middle, creating high-density housing with enough space for theater space. I know it because I did it; my Master's Thesis focused on affordable housing. Now I know I gave my project no chance to be affordable with this move alone. You see? I was always wrong 10 years ago. Tune in 10 years from now to see how everything I said today is wrong.

  Profit Machine is great at shapeshifting, so we must be careful. Medium density is less about building scale and more about the size of the Profit Machine player. As such, 5 over 1 is not middle housing; it is high density sideways, as one entity owns an entire block. A gated community with multiple 3-story houses is also not middle housing; it is high-density, chopped into pieces and scattered across the landscape. It is still an interconnected whole owned by a single entity, and it even has a dedicated marketing bungalow for sales. Medium density only works if all buildings belong to individual owners. They could pool their money and build a shared marketing set piece, but I have never seen individuals so coordinated.

• Secondary Market Scheme. Middle housing, as build-to-own, has a high chance of reaching the secondary market. There, it is naturally resistant to buy-to-sell schemes, as it is too large for an average flipper to buy and "improve", and large players have no incentive to touch it as it is too small a fish to fry.

• Government scheme. The government's role in the missing middle is to provide a financial stream for middle-housing developers and dedicate lots inclusively to middle housing. It will do what it does best: regulate.  Instead of putting all eggs in one basket by trusting a few large developers with no incentive to be affordable, it will have hundreds of developers experimenting, taking risks, and stealing ideas from each other. In other words, we exchange a large static entity for a dynamic, self-evolving group of entities.

• Project Failure scheme. Small developers have every incentive to chase failing typologies to save money. It's always more reassuring to renovate an existing structure than to get a brand-new piece off the ground. This will further diversify affordable housing and make it more resistant to subversions.

• Shared ownership scheme. Middle housing shares just enough assets to be affordable, but not enough assets to be annoying to use. In high density, most units share floor, ceiling, and two walls. In middle housing, most units share two out of four surfaces. That reduces conflicts dramatically.

Conclusion

Below is the framework summary for affordable design.

MIDDLE HOUSING WITH THE FOLLOWING TRAITS:

• Revenue generation

• High utilization

• Mix use

• Flexible

• Fostering Community

The next chapter will showcase practical examples of how this framework is applied to design affordable housing.