Architectural Record: 

“In Search of the $100 House

The Atlantic Cities: 

“The U.S. Simply Doesn’t Have Enough Available Rental Housing, Whether You’re Rich or Poor

Emily Badger. Feb 25, 2013

The Census Bureau says there are about 41 million renter households in the United States, a group making up about 35 percent of the country. And the renter ranks are expected to swell this decade as the housing demand of Baby Boomers and their children starts to converge. Twentysomethings who’ve been living at home during the recession will finally move out to form their own households. Many Baby Boomers, meanwhile, are expected to downsize into smaller rentals units where they won’t have to mow their own lawns.

Housing wonks have projected that we may need to build at least 3 million new rental apartment units in the next 10 years to satisfy all these people. And if you’re a renter just about anywhere in the country, you may already be feeling the crunch: As Cities reported last summer, it’s lately become cheaper to buy a home than to rent one in the vast majority of America’s 100 largest metros.

This is a problem for young professionals and even decently paid ones trying to live close to jobs in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco. But America’s shortage of affordable rental housing trickles down with particularly depressing effects to the extremely low-income.”

Photo: Shutterstock

Daily News: 

“NYCHA set to lease playgrounds, community centers for luxury high-rises

The housing authority hopes to generate nearly $50 million in lease payments that will be used to rejuvenate deteriorating housing projects and close $60 million annual deficit.

Greg B. Smith. Feb 5, 2013

The housing authority is planning its very own Tale of Two Cities.

To raise much-needed cash, the agency plans to lease out land to private developers who will then build some 3 million square feet of luxury apartments smack in the middle of Manhattan housing projects.

Internal documents obtained by the Daily News show the planned 4,330 apartments in eight developments are all in hot real estate neighborhoods, including the upper East and West Sides, the lower East Side and lower Manhattan.

Developers will get a sweet deal: a 99-year lease with the lease payments to the authority frozen for the first 35 years.

And they’ll get a big break on property taxes because 20% of the units will be set aside as “affordable,” offered to families of four that make $50,000 or less.

But the vast majority of units — 80% — are “market rate,” and in the neighborhoods chosen by the New York City Housing Authority, that rate is astronomical.”

Photo: Smith Houses tenant Association President Aixa Torres opposes the NYCHA plan to build luxury apartments on playgrounds, community centers and parking lots.

ANTHONY LANZILOTE/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

The Lo-Down: 

NYCHA Plans Luxury Housing Alongside Five LES Public Housing Projects

The next big housing battle on the Lower East Side is upon us.  In the past month, officials with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) have been briefing elected officials and some tenant leaders about plans to lease a huge amount of property alongside public housing to private developers for market-rate apartments and retail.    Last night, at a meeting of Community Board 3′s land use committee, activists began to mobilize against the proposal, one tenant leader saying in regards to NYCHA, “if you want a war you’ve got a war.”

The cash-strapped agency has been talking about selling or leasing some of its property for years.  A 2008 report from the Manhattan Borough President found that the housing authority has more than 30 million square feet of unused property rights (including parking lots, playgrounds and open space).  In September, NYCHA Chairman John Rhea signaled that he was preparing to move ahead with the leasing plan as a way of narrowing the authority’s annual $60 million budget gap.

Members of the City Council, including local representatives Margaret Chin and Rosie Mendez, have been told that NYCHA plans to put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) from developers next month. The Daily News obtained “internal documents” showing an initial offering of three million square feet “in hot real estate neighborhoods, including the upper East and West Sides, the lower East Side and lower Manhattan.”

Photo: via Alfred E. Smith Houses Facebook page.

The Atlantic Cities:

Brooklyn’s Affordability Crisis Is No Accident

Stephen Smith. Jan 16, 2013

Let’s not bother trying to sugarcoat it: New York City is in the midst of a gentrification crisis.

What started as a germ in Greenwich Village half a century ago has come to engulf most of the island of Manhattan, and is making significant inroads in Brooklyn and Queens. The city’s elite have pushed the vanguard out of their trendy Manhattan neighborhoods, and those same artists, cool kids and gays are in turn now pushing the poor and middle class out of their outer borough neighborhoods.

The city has experienced rapid urban displacement in the past, but the current crisis is different in one very important way: the housing that the poor are losing to the rich is not being replaced.”

Photo: Shutterstock

“Some See Little Room for Large, Poor Families in Mayor’s Housing Plan

By Winnie Hu. Oct 19, 2012.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that the city was planning to develop new super-small apartments — called “microunits” — it represented another step toward his ambitious goal of building or preserving 165,000 homes for poor and moderate-income families across New York by 2014.

But some housing advocates, community leaders and elected officials say this latest proposal only highlights that one demographic group has been left out: large, poor families.

This group includes members as disparate as West Africans in the South Bronx, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and Bangladeshi in Queens, who are united by their inability to afford the high prices for large market-rate rentals and their inability to find publicly subsidized alternatives even as the overall housing stock has swelled.

So Mahamadou Tounkara and his wife and six children squeeze into one room of a market-rate, three-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx that they share with two other families because they cannot afford the monthly $1,112 rent alone. Twenty more large families at their mosque are in a similar bind even as several new city-financed buildings have risen nearby.

“It’s hard to live like this,” said Mr. Tounkara, who is a part-time auto mechanic. “You want more space, but if you don’t have money, how are you going to pay for it?”

The overwhelming majority of city-financed housing has consisted of smaller apartments — studios, one- and two-bedrooms — in part because city officials see the greatest need for them based on demographic patterns, and because many developers say the city provides subsidies for projects in a way that does not encourage building larger apartments. The shortage of housing for bigger families has been exacerbated because many of the existing apartments with three or more bedrooms in the city’s public housing stock currently have only one or two occupants.

The struggles of these families come as those who have long applauded the efforts of the mayor, who has been credited with overseeing the city’s largest expansion of affordable housing since the 1980s, look more closely at the results.”

Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“Low-Income Housing That Anyone Would Love To Live In

Ariel Schwartz. September 25, 2012

Housing for the poor doesn’t need to be horrible. The Richardson apartments in San Francisco are offering up high-class digs in the hopes of helping to lift its residents out of poverty

Low-income housing generally isn’t all that nice; stories like this about single-room occupancy buildings (SROs) with infestations, leaking pipes, and overflowing toilets aren’t uncommon. That’s starting to change, however, now that cities are realizing that quality low-income housing can provide a stepping stone to stability for residents. In San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, the recently completed Richardson Apartments provide formerly homeless residents (many with physical and mental disabilities) with beautiful living spaces and social services. 

The SRO, a project of David Baker and Partners Architects, is part of a larger neighborhood redevelopment. After the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, a freeway that ran through the city became structurally unstable and collapsed. Now, decades later, projects like the Richardson Apartments are popping up below the site of the former freeway. The Richardson building was completed in September 2011.

The 120-unit, five-story building is the kind of place that most city-dwellers would love to live in: It features sustainably harvested wood (including redwood and elm), a landscaped courtyard, a green roof, sunshades outside the apartment windows, solar hot water heating, solar panels, intelligent lighting controls, and low-VOC paints. The apartments also have amenities tailored to the population, including abuse-resistant drywall and cabinets, grab bars everywhere, and wheelchair-accessible showers. The building doesn’t have car parking, but it does have parking for bikes—not that tenants would be likely to have a vehicle or even need one in this transit-rich neighborhood.

With an average of 300 square feet per apartment, the living spaces in the building aren’t huge. But “all the things a formerly homeless person would need are right on site,” explains Amit Price Patel, the project architect. That includes a counseling center, a medical suite, a community room, and a residents’ lounge. There are also retail spaces on the ground floor: a Vietnamese sandwich shop, a picture frame shop, and most importantly for residents, a bakery and cafe that provides a “paid learning experience” for people who are disabled and homeless or at risk of becoming so.

The apartments are affordable for all who live there—residents pay 30% of their income as rent, up to a maximum of $870. And the building is saving money for the city, too. The 120 apartment residents used $2.4 million in city and medical services in the year before moving in. It’s a cost that is being dramatically cut with the onsite medical clinic.”

Via: Fast Company

“A Housing Project Upgrade Done Right

Kaid Benfield. Sept 17, 2012

Lincoln Heights, Ohio, is about a dozen miles north of Cincinnati. It contains around 4,500 residents, 98 percent of them African-American. In fact, according to a community website, it was the first self-governing African American community north of the Mason-Dixon Line and at one time the largest. But household income is low, and only about a third of the town’s single-family homes are owner-occupied.

What I will write here is really a set-up for the evocative video below. It shows the story of Valley Homes, a cooperatively owned housing project built in Lincoln Heights in 1942 that had become badly deteriorated, because mounting needed repairs to buildings that had been poorly constructed in the first place had become too numerous and too expensive for its low-income owners to undertake. In 2005, the property fell into receivership and two years later a task force was appointed to search for a permanent solution. The details of what happened over the next few years and the evolution of the project’s ownership and financial structure are complex. 

But high on the list of task force goals were new senior housing and allowing current residents to stay. Eventually the old buildings were condemned and torn down, and the group selected a development firm named the Model Group to redevelop the site. The good news is that Valley Homes has now been replaced with a mix of updated and affordable housing types called Villas of the Valley, and the site is once again serving the community. Jay Springer elaborates onCincinnati.com:

The redevelopment of the site was identified as a top community priority in the Lincoln Heights Urban Renewal Plan and Revitalization Strategy of 2001. Model Group worked closely with the residents of the Valley Homes Redevelopment Task Force and the Lincoln Heights Planning Commission to develop designs appropriate and sensitive to the surrounding community. This development included the demolition of functionally obsolete, dilapidated housing and the construction of 42 new ranch-style, detached senior cottages, 35 two-story, attached rental units, and 4 single-family detached homes. 

Model Group’s effort to incorporate community feedback combined with key members of the Planning Commission publicly championing the project resulted in a transformational development for the Village of Lincoln Heights.

The new development also includes a community center. 

The change is certainly impressive and, in some respects, green. But it is not perfect: from the perspective of smart growth and city planning ideals, one can certainly find fault with the new neighborhood, which took a step back by replacing part of the traditional street grid with cul-de-sacs, and constructed fewer homes than the site once contained. I’m particularly disappointed that parts of the development appear even to lack sidewalks. But this is not a major transit-oriented, affordable and mixed-use showcase with the impressive scale and urban detail of, say, Denver’s remarkable South Lincoln transformation. (It also hasn’t enjoyed the focus and assistance of multiple federal agencies, as has that project.) Nor does it contain the sparkling green ambition of, for example, Seattle’s High Point. The financing appears to have been challenging, to say the least.

No, this is a much smaller and more modest project, but one no less important to its community and certainly no less significant to its residents, whose lives it has vastly improved. You would have to be blind not to see the dramatic improvement. It looks terrific to my eye, suggesting some of the first, more densely populated inner suburbs” 

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: The Model Group

“A Recipe for Chic Senior Housing

San Francisco based Leddy Maytum Stacy has created a unique low-income housing development that is not only senior citizen friendly but also a stylish addition to the neighborhood. Located in Oakland’s Chinatown near a BART station, Merritt Crossing provides safe, sleek, and affordable transit-oriented housing for up to 70 low-income seniors.

Leddy Maytum Stacy worked closely with theAffordable Housing Associates non-profit to create a space that challenged most institutional designs. The multi-colored facade is vibrant and includes a number of screened panels that act as trellises to support living plants. Many rooms have balconies that are recessed into the building to provide a shaded outdoor space that is also protected from nearby traffic noise. A community room and kitchen encourage social interaction and support while a garden and courtyard immediately outside foster leisure activities and outdoor relaxation.

The firm’s design is also slated to be stock full of eco-friendly features. Rooftop solar panels provide heat and electricity while hidden planters help retain storm water. Recycled metal framing is used around the outer facade while floor to ceiling windows create bright, sunny public spaces that are also well ventilated. Even the parking garage is wrapped in green screen panels that will eventually grow a vertical garden along the sidewalk. Leddy Maytum and Stacy not only expects the building to receive LEED platinum status but also score highly withEnergy Star, GreenPoint, and Bay Friendly landscaping.

With community care in mind, the firm and non-profit have also set aside almost half of the residence for formerly homeless or in danger of becoming homeless people.”

Via: Architizer

Photo: All photos courtesy of Tim Griffith

“Micro-apartments next for S.F.?

Carolyn Said. July 13, 2012

Are itty-bitty apartments the next wave for urban dwellers in San Francisco?

The city is considering shrinking the minimum size of rental units, prompted by a demographic shift toward one-person households along with rising rents and an acute housing shortage.

“This seems like a logical, necessary response to housing in an extremely high-cost market like San Francisco,” said Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, a largely developer-backed nonprofit that is “solidly behind” cutting the size of the smallest allowable apartment by about a third.

The new minimum would be 150 square feet plus kitchen, bathroom and closet - 220 square feet in total, about the size of a one-car garage. The current minimum with all rooms included is 290 square feet.

“The goal is to provide flexibility to affordable and market-rate developers to produce all sorts of housing,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener, whose proposal to reduce apartment sizes will be considered by the Board of Supervisors on July 24. “The fact is 41 percent of San Franciscans live alone. There are a lot of people who don’t need or can’t afford a lot of space.”

Some housing advocates dispute the idea that micro-units address escalating rents, saying that the compact dwellings are cheaper simply because they’re smaller.”

Are itty-bitty apartments the next wave for urban dwellers in San Francisco?

The city is considering shrinking the minimum size of rental units, prompted by a demographic shift toward one-person households along with rising rents and an acute housing shortage.

“This seems like a logical, necessary response to housing in an extremely high-cost market like San Francisco,” said Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, a largely developer-backed nonprofit that is “solidly behind” cutting the size of the smallest allowable apartment by about a third.

The new minimum would be 150 square feet plus kitchen, bathroom and closet - 220 square feet in total, about the size of a one-car garage. The current minimum with all rooms included is 290 square feet.

“The goal is to provide flexibility to affordable and market-rate developers to produce all sorts of housing,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener, whose proposal to reduce apartment sizes will be considered by the Board of Supervisors on July 24. “The fact is 41 percent of San Franciscans live alone. There are a lot of people who don’t need or can’t afford a lot of space.”

Some housing advocates dispute the idea that micro-units address escalating rents, saying that the compact dwellings are cheaper simply because they’re smaller.

“It’s disingenuous to say it creates affordable housing, it’s just that you get significantly less space,” said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco. “This doesn’t create affordable housing, it simply creates another lifestyle option.”

She also worries that the “shoe-box” units could create a slippery slope of allowing other exemptions on considerations like natural light and ceiling height.

On the drawing board

Patrick Kennedy of Berkeley developer Panoramic Interests hopes to build the micro-units in SoMa on the site of a former guitar store at Ninth and Mission streets - “right in the thick of the new Twittersphere there.” He anticipates housing young tech workers, fresh out of college, newly relocated to the city, unencumbered by possessions.

“That demographic cohort wants to continue their collegiate experience for an indefinite amount of time,” Kennedy said. “I envision this as a launching space as they get established.”

His planned 160-unit building, now in the entitlement process, will have lots of common areas: a huge lobby, a lounge on every floor and a rooftop deck. It will also have some larger apartments. It’s designed for car-free living; the only parking will be for bikes, with a City CarShare spot outside.

The ultra-efficient efficiencies will go for $1,300 to $1,500 a month, he said. Per city regulations, 15 percent of the units will be allocated as below market rate for low-income residents; he thinks those would rent for around $900 a month.

The current average rent for a San Francisco studio apartment is $2,075 a month, according to real estate service RealFacts. Those studios average 493 square feet, making the per-square foot price $4.21. Kennedy’s proposed units, at 220 square feet, would rent for $5.91 to $6.82 per foot - a big premium.

“It’s disingenuous to say it creates affordable housing, it’s just that you get significantly less space,” said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco. “This doesn’t create affordable housing, it simply creates another lifestyle option.”

She also worries that the “shoe-box” units could create a slippery slope of allowing other exemptions on considerations like natural light and ceiling height.

On the drawing board

Patrick Kennedy of Berkeley developer Panoramic Interests hopes to build the micro-units in SoMa on the site of a former guitar store at Ninth and Mission streets - “right in the thick of the new Twittersphere there.” He anticipates housing young tech workers, fresh out of college, newly relocated to the city, unencumbered by possessions.

“That demographic cohort wants to continue their collegiate experience for an indefinite amount of time,” Kennedy said. “I envision this as a launching space as they get established.”

His planned 160-unit building, now in the entitlement process, will have lots of common areas: a huge lobby, a lounge on every floor and a rooftop deck. It will also have some larger apartments. It’s designed for car-free living; the only parking will be for bikes, with a City CarShare spot outside.

The ultra-efficient efficiencies will go for $1,300 to $1,500 a month, he said. Per city regulations, 15 percent of the units will be allocated as below market rate for low-income residents; he thinks those would rent for around $900 a month.

The current average rent for a San Francisco studio apartment is $2,075 a month, according to real estate service RealFacts. Those studios average 493 square feet, making the per-square foot price $4.21. Kennedy’s proposed units, at 220 square feet, would rent for $5.91 to $6.82 per foot - a big premium.”

Via: SF Gate

Photo: An illustrated interior of a proposed small apartment. / SF