Affordable: Design Framework

Intro

Let’s take what we’ve learned so far and create a framework of affordable housing typology.

Affordable = revenue-generating

Many falsely believe that asset stripping is the key to affordability. Slums of Mumbai showed that the opposite is true. Even communities below the international poverty level can acquire high-value assets. However, there is an important caveat:

Low-income communities can possess a high-value asset only if it generates revenue.

The one thing low-income communities can’t afford is an underutilized asset. I will demonstrate it by showing how a low-income person can afford a mansion.

Mansion

We can encounter the following assets in a mansion, depending on income:

Sitting room. The living room is for living, the sitting room is for sitting. Sitting in a living room is impossible, as sitting is too docile for living.
Great room. Sometimes you want a room that’s just great. Greatness and clutter don’t mix, so the room is empty. Only greatness-boosting assets, such as a Christmas tree, are allowed.
Dining room. Carrying plates to and from the kitchen is a hassle, so most dining happens in the kitchen or a breakfast nook. The dining room is reserved for great occasions that are not great enough for the great room: birthdays, Christmas, or Thanksgiving dinners.
Kitchens. Indeed, we have multiple kitchens. One is a staged kitchen from Best Kitchens magazine, fully functional but hardly ever used for cooking. Another is a crammed kitchen in the back, filled with unsightly equipment and designed to tuck away catering staff during parties.
Ten Bedrooms. Three bedrooms are used every day by residents; the rest are for in-laws and estranged children who stay over twice a year, for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Year-round, the bedrooms are used for bragging rights, allowing the owner to state that they live in a ten-bedroom house.
Privatized Public Domain. At high incomes, residents start to take certain functions from the public domain and create smaller, inferior copies at home. The cinema at home will always be smaller, have worse AV, and lack the newest movies. The bar at home won’t allow us to meet any new people and will lack the social buzz. The gym at home will lack equipment and will be depressing overall. All such functions will be underutilized or abandoned entirely.
The Great Lawn. A killer of human anthill typology, the great lawn is at home here. It is just as useless as its low-income counterpart, but at a high income, high-value assets can exist purely for aesthetic purposes.

Despite what my cheekiness might indicate, I’m not judging mansions. The number of underutilized assets naturally increases with income because convenience starts to trample efficiency. As I went from low income in Russia to high income in the US (I was low-income in the US for some time, too), I also collected assets, mostly electronics, that I hardly ever use. During cleaning, I rediscovered some of the assets that I forgot I owned, something that would have been inconceivable at times when I had a low income.

So, how can low-income residents afford a mansion with the aforementioned spaces? It's easy. It just wouldn’t be called a mansion. It would be called a Bed and Breakfast (B&B).

The sitting room will become the reception, the grand room will become the lobby, the dining room will serve breakfast, the stage kitchen will be heavily used for cooking, the second kitchen will serve as the back of the house kitchen for staff, many guest bedrooms will become hotel rooms, and the Great Lawn will grow crops or serve as an outdoor wedding venue. The privatized public domain will turn into amenities, lacking in quality nonetheless, but at least utilized through high foot traffic.

You may point out that it hardly sounds like a low-income business. You’d be surprised. A substantial number of small businesses are yielding low income for many reasons, such as being situated in a low-income area or their business being disrupted by a larger player. Owning a B&B is tough since Airbnb became a thing. Also, the farmers are well-known to be “broke millionaires”, as they have millions of dollars in assets, land, and equipment, yet the results of their hard work are often cancelled by weather and high maintenance and operation fees, which puts some of them at a low-income level.

Why bother, then? Endless upside for social mobility. While business owners' income starts at around minimum wage, it ends well in the upper-middle class and beyond. At the same time, low-income wage work will likely remain low-income wage work.

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Any assets we propose to a low-income community must generate revenue for residents (not an outside third party) or be capable of doing so.

Can they afford a winter garden that just looks nice? No. Can they afford a greenhouse that looks nice and grows food for sale? Possibly. Can they have a gym? Maybe. What if the gym permits dance classes run by residents? Then definitely. Garage? Probably not, indoor parking is a privilege. What if the garage is also a small mechanics or customization shop (vinyl wrap is fashionable at the time of writing)? Perhaps.

In other words, the lower the income, the more pressure the program is under to generate revenue. If there are design obstructions to revenue generation or the cost is too high to get it going, the whole program will likely fail, as human anthills have demonstrated many times over.

The key to affordability is not asset-stripping but strategically providing assets that the residents can use to generate revenue for themselves—or, at minimum, not obstructing residents' attempts to generate revenue with our design moves.

Fighting the informal vs embracing and learning from it.

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 programs 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 the programs of one room to expand in favor 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.

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Note that 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 overlapping, 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.

The low-income residents can’t afford an underutilized area.

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 state that R zoning hamstrings anyone, regardless of income, but high-income individuals could, as always, cancel out the disadvantages by spending, whereas 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.

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 putting the low-income community into an R-zone, we failed to crush their 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 negatively impacting 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 are a further barrier between the customer and a 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. Fitouts 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, there is a needless quarter-million-dollar barrier that low-income residents must overcome before they spend a single dollar on the business itself.

Low-income communities have enough constraints being low-income. 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 max out the number of units per lot (a frequent starting requirement of human anthills) and permit an easy residential-to-commercial switch if needed.

Every design move in a low-income community must permit more uses of the space instead of limiting the space to a singular 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 claiming to foster community do nothing or have a negative effect on fostering community.

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 involves getting in your car and driving for 30 minutes to eat tapas, each costing 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, the majority of social interactions in low-income communities happen spontaneously, as a part of their daily routine. 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.

There is a high chance that spontaneous social interactions will result in spaces for planned social interactions.

The danger of lacking community

Fostering community in a low-income area is the most important aspect of affordable design. Without a community with 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 for them, as they have community and plenty of opportunities.

Having a tight community also helps to deal with inevitable interpersonal frictions. Low-income residents are locked in stiff competition over the crumbs that fall out of the Profit Machine. Frictions are inevitable, and if we are not careful, frictions are all they will have.

Conclusion

We established the following framework for affordable design.

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.

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