September 2001

Planning

Copyright by American Planning Association

The Price Is Right, and So Is the Design

Best practices in affordable housing.

By Ruth Eckdish Knack, AICP

When a building budget is tight, good design, and good materials, are often the first casualties. "Theyre considered a frill," says University of Illinois at Chicago architecture professor Roberta Feldman.

Feldman, who directs the multidisciplinary City Design Center at UIC, is hoping to dispel that idea with a new Internet catalog of best practices in affordable housing design. The catalog will be unveiled at an October symposium in Chicago.

Cant do it alone

Feldman cofounded the City Design Center with planner George Hemmens, AICP, in 1996. It's housed in the College of Architecture and the Arts. The center's main goal, she says, is to provide services for communities that are underserved by the design professions.

A side benefit is to give UIC architecture and planning students a chance to work on real projects and to learn about career opportunities in the nonprofit sector.

"For me, it's exciting because I get to work with people in other professions," Feldman says. "That very much fits in with my belief that the problems of the built environment are extremely complex and can't be handled by one discipline alone."

Feldman's interest in affordable housingand in residents' attitudes toward itis nothing new. A New York City native, she earned a master's degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. "I cut my teeth on a HUD project in Philadelphia," she says.

Seven years of practice, part of that spent working on new towns, convinced her that plans often go astray. "I lived and worked in the planned town of Columbia, Maryland, which was an example of an environment that did not always work the way planners thought it would."

Concluding that she was more interested in studying how places affected the people who lived in them than in practice, Feldman enrolled at the City University of New York for a Ph.D. in environmental psychology. "I wanted a greater understanding of the use and meaning of space," she says. For her dissertation she interviewed residents of the Denver area about their ideas of "home."

In 1985, Feldman was hired to teach architecture at UIC. Almost a decade later, she found herself on a committee connected with the university's "Great Cities Initiative," which was intended to bring together a variety of urban disciplines under one rubric. "Design was not represented initially in the Great Cities program," she recalls. "I argued that it should be and recommended starting a multidisciplinary design center that would also involve urban planning faculty."

The center that finally evolved is different from most university-sponsored community design centers in part because it is cross-disciplinary. "It's really stimulating to work with the faculty and students from different fields," Feldman says.

"Over the years," she says, "we have refined our mission to fit what we believe a university-based design center can do best. That is to provide design and planning information to nonprofit groups and government agencies. We don't focus on specific solutions but rather on increasing a community's capacity to make design and planning decisions."

Thus, the City Design Center creates planning scenarios, but not master plans. It prepares schematic designs and site plans, but not documents. It does some graphic design, for instance working with a community development corporation in Chicago on banners for an industrial corridor.

This summer, says Feldman, the center, assisted by UIC architecture students, is helping the staff of the Marcy-Newberry Association, a church-related community center, to develop a plan for supportive housing, day care, and elder care for elderly and disabled residents of Chicago's near west side.

At Wentworth Gardens, a public housing project, residents asked the center to prepare an architecture and engineering report on building and grounds conditions. To get the technical expertise needed in this case, Feldman went to an architecture firm and an engineering firm seeking pro bono help. "I've become a broker," she says. "I make deals."

Center funding comes from a variety of sources, including the College of Architecture and the Arts and the university provost's office. But outside grants and contracts account for 80 percent of the center's annual budget, Feldman says. The center received a $500,000 grant from the Fannie Mae Foundation University-Community Partnership Initiatives program to work with several Chicago community organizations on housing-based revitalization programs. Other grants helped to fund an Internet catalog on best practices in affordable housing.

Models needed

"I kept getting phone calls from around the country asking for examples of good affordable design," Feldman says. "And I never knew what to suggest."

That's when the idea of an Internet catalog took hold. It would showcase innovative housing models, including mixed-use, collaborative, and live-work development. "I wanted to show examples of cost-effective, aesthetically pleasing, and energy-efficient housing, accessible housing, and housing that is designed to fit into a neighborhood context and is appropriate for different types of households," she says.

"But mainly I wanted to show the importance of good design. I don't believe that good architecture requires expensive materials. But how can we convince developers of this? They say good design is a frill, that land costs and financing are what counts. That's true, but if you don't have good design, your project will fail in the long run."

To make that point, Feldman knew that the catalog had to show real projects that came in on time and on budget. "We chose projects built in the last 20 years," she notes, "so people could not say conditions are different today. We had to show different housing types and different construction practices (including prefabricated). We were determined to include rehab as well as new construction, and to show housing in urban, suburban, and rural settings."

A national advisory committee helped her to find the projects. Their nominations plus an open call for entries netted 270 submissions. The number was finally whittled down to 77 exemplary projects.

"The submissions were amazing," says Feldman. "We got entries in every categoryfrom single-family to high-rise. There are mixed-use projects and cohousing and housing with ground-floor space for cottage industries. We also got some fantastic adaptive reuse, of schools, a theater, an office building in Toledo. The catalog makes it clear that there is no universal solution to the affordable housing problem. There are many diverse solutions."

A surprise was the relatively small number of entries demonstrating prefab construction. "There's still a prejudice against that," she says. Also noteworthy was the geographical imbalance of the submissions, with West Coast entries far outnumbering those from the rest of the country.

"Overall," says Feldman, "the catalog proves what I've always known: that it is possible to provide distinctive homes for people of all income levels."

Ruth Knack is the executive editor of Planning.