Why Design Affordable Housing?

Every firm should be home to affordable housing projects. Here’s why.

Why design affordable housing?

It’s a fair question for any firm — and sure, the first thing that might come to mind is the prestige factor.

If affordable housing projects seem to win all the industry awards, well, they often do, and for good reason. Organizations doling out awards celebrate the power of craft — and affordable housing projects tend to showcase the field at its most distilled, innovative, future-focused and human.

Of course, underpinning those accolades is the sheer need for this work at large. The housing crisis very much remains a crisis. Housing shrank during COVID, and has only limped toward a rebound. Research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition reveals that 70% of extremely low-income families in the U.S. are spending more than half of their income on rent. Moreover, there’s a shortage of 6.8 million affordable housing units across the board, a critical barrier to reducing intergenerational poverty.

The good news is that as the public has come to realize how widespread the crisis is, the stigma around such projects has dissipated significantly — and complementing that, affordable housing works. Counts of the unhoused reveal that we’re in the midst of an inflection point. In San Diego, where I’m based, a midyear count showed that unsheltered family homelessness was down 72%. This is design that drives real-world impact.

From a process standpoint, this all-encompassing need demands speed. This is a critical path idea. You have to get people into housing as expediently and efficiently as possible. To that end, a decade and a half ago, a colleague showed me a handful of design variations he’d been working on for an affordable housing project. I told him we needed to move faster toward finalizing the work. He responded that we weren’t going to have good design if we sacrificed quality for speed. But that overlooked a critical point: When it comes to this work, there’s no time for meandering ideation. We simply have to get to good design faster.

Indeed, these projects can break your typical processes. But that’s one of the best things about them, because they serve as a reminder of possibility, and offer a medley of lessons for any discipline in providing better, faster. Not long ago, we submitted a permit for a project that would have traditionally been scoped as an 18-month build … but it had to be completed in seven months. The documentation alone would usually take nine; we did it in two. The key? Cooperation. Collaboration. All fueled by that acute need, and necessitating every outside-the-box design strategy a team can muster.

Over the past eight years, we’ve been working with Family Health Centers of San Diego to develop a mixed-family, mixed-use supportive housing complex in El Cerrito, California. Designed for formerly unhoused residents, the project blends traditional and modular elements, using a concrete structure for a clinic and parking area, and prefabricated shipping containers for (so far) 41 housing units — which shaved six months off the construction schedule alone.

Crafted with a mindset of housing as healthcare, in addition to featuring a core trio of clinics (one for veterans, one for families and one for substance-abuse issues), the design eschews the traditional center-courtyard model for an orientation benefiting from biophilic sea breezes and natural sunlight. Since those transitioning from homelessness often suffer from isolation, the building holistically fosters shared community spaces and encourages connection by design, from strategically placed staircases to a resident-managed community garden.

And that all strikes at the heart of what makes affordable housing such an utterly unique design opportunity: In a foundational, fundamental way, designers are thinking deeply about the occupants from the first moment. It’s architecture inextricably connected to people, and in perpetual symbiosis with them.

And it’s design that benefits all people, regardless of whether they live on site or not. Public funding often mandates a higher level of sustainability for affordable housing (which is also why you so often see these projects winning COTE Awards). It’s just another element seeded in from the very first moment. At El Cerrito, that resulted in a solar thermal system for hot water (meeting 100% of the building’s needs), relocating mechanical systems to the underground parking garage to make space for more PV panels on the roof, and so on.

Affordable housing design indeed mandates a shift in mindset — but every firm can drive results in this space, regardless of whether a given project is public, private, affordable, market rate, small, medium, large…

It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment that could redefine the future. And it already is.

Why design affordable housing?

It’s a no-brainer.

Matthew Winter has managed a variety of award-winning projects of multiple typologies, including housing, medical, civic, developer and mixed use. His work on the Pacific Center Campus in Southern California received the 2017 American Architecture Award and the 2016 Best Project for Office/Retail/Mixed Use from ENR’s California’s Best Projects. He is currently serving on the Historic Resource Board of the City of San Diego.