Intro

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

Affordable Doesn’t Mean Cheap

Affordable doesn't mean cheap, or bad, or substandard. Slums of Mumbai showed that low-income communities can have high-value assets if they are extremely well utilized and generate value. It can be formulated in the following thesis:

The main thing a low-income community can’t afford is an underutilized asset.

Pretty much anything else is doable. Let’s review a couple of examples in the US.

Mansion

Let's examine a mansion and upper-middle-class housing typologies. We can encounter the following lightly-used assets, depending on income:

• Sitting room. Can you sit in a living room? Yes. Would you? Not if you have another dedicated room for it.

• Grand room. Sometimes you want a room that’s just awesome. A Christmas tree is a passing visitor.

• Dining room. Dragging plates to and from the kitchen is a hassle, so most dining happens in the kitchen or a breakfast nook. The dining room will be used twice a year, for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners.

• Kitchens. Indeed, we have multiple kitchens. One is a staged kitchen with nice finishes, a bowl of fruits, a spotless (never used) 6-burner gas range, and also spotless (also never used) copper pots. 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 guests. Guest bedrooms are used only on Christmas and Thanksgiving, when in-laws are in town, and even then, a couple of them end up empty. All other times, guest bedrooms are used for bragging rights, allowing the owner to state that they live in a ten-bedroom house.

• 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 someone who went from two pennies to my name to middle-class (credit belongs entirely to my dad), I also collected a bunch of assets, mostly electronics, that I hardly ever use. Conversely, the lower the income, the more the assets are utilized.

Can low-income residents afford a mansion with the aforementioned program? Actually, yes. Except it won’t be called a mansion. It will be called a small hotel.

The sitting room will become the reception, the grand room will become the lobby, the dining room will serve breakfast, both kitchens will be heavily used, many guest bedrooms will become hotel rooms, and the Great Lawn will grow crops.

Fun Fact: Farmers are known as forever-broke millionaires. They have millions of dollars in assets, land, and equipment, yet they are often low-income or in the red, as a season of bad weather can cancel out the revenue from their assets and all the hard work.

Exploring the slums of Mumbai, I saw people at the international poverty level possessing high-value assets: industrial machinery, large buildings, and even expensive cars. How come they can afford it? What is the secret?

Heavy utilization. Low-income communities are more than capable of keeping high-value assets as long as they are heavily utilized, often by many overlapping uses, and generate revenue. From these observations, I formulated the following thesis.

The main thing a low-income community can’t afford is an underutilized asset.

This explains the failure of many affordable typologies in the US—we kept handing low-income communities assets they could not effectively utilize. On a community scale, the neighborhoods we create are strictly R-zoned, limiting the land to one use—residential. On the building scale, the very construction makes any activity except R impossible. Finally, the units are also configured strictly for R use, without consideration for any other potential use.

Simply put, low-income communities cannot afford what we give them, cheap or not.

Searching for a solution - Folding and Unfolding

Let’s do an experiment. Let’s take a

Problem: Accommodations

I bet you that you will choose the street over the shelter by the time you finish reading this section. Remember the hypothetical young lady who fled her abusive boyfriend in Homelessness: Overcoming the Bias article? Let’s see where she and people like her are greeted.

• Feel. Shelters feel like prisons: hostile. Shelter typology is unaware of the book Defensible Spaces (Oscar Newman, 1972). Shelters do everything this book warned against, creating rugged, oppressive, controlling spaces, with correctional aspirations. Value engineering as the sole design intent: we end up with a core and shell, with some nice façade to keep the neighborhood happy. People conquer the hostile space with informal uses, each indicating a design issue.