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Web Site Helps Affordable Home Builders Achieve High-Quality Design

Builders and developers who are looking for information on how to achieve higher levels of design quality at the same time as they work to make their housing more affordable should consult a Web-based tool — the Affordable Housing Design Advisor — that was created to help community development organizations, Deane Evans, executive director of the Center for Architecture and Building Science Research at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ, told a symposium on affordable housing at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. at the end of last month.

One feature of the Web site provides “20 Steps to Design Quality” that were developed by owners and designers to provide a systematic framework at every stage of the design, construction, operations and maintenance process.

“Affordable housing development is mostly about development, which is a problem,” said Evans. “If you ignore design, you’re going to end up with shelter and nothing more.”

The Web site also includes a gallery of 80 case studies of high-quality affordable housing and a checklist of 60 key design considerations organized into nine categories: parking, public open space, building shape, building appearance, private open space, landscaping, building location, building layout and unit layout.

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The site was developed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development with assistance from the American Institute of Architects, the Enterprise Foundation, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the National Congress for Community Economic Development and the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation.

Looking to the future, Evans said that he didn’t see any innovations — such as indoor plumbing, air conditioning and elevators — that would radically change the forms of the residential buildings that are being designed today. However, he did note three trends being driven by technological advances that will have an impact on how homes are designed:

• The movement to sustainability, green building and energy efficiency  — which materialized in the past only to fall out of favor — has “got legs this time” and as “projects are moving towards zero energy” consumption, he said, “forms of buildings are being thought of differently."
• When NAHB and others pursued but largely failed to develop “Smart Homes” a decade or so ago, they were ahead of their time, “but technology has now become so much smarter,” Evans said, that market opportunities for applying this technology are arising in the homes of aging baby boomers and those with age-related disabilities. As an example, Evans cited the case of a quadriplegic who is able to monitor and run the operations of his home from a flat-screen panel at the foot of his bed. “The house is going to take care of the people who are in it,” Evans predicted.
• Manufactured/factory-produced housing is “pushing the envelope of what you can do with HUD-approved boxes,” such as shared duplexes, that has especially significant potential for urban infill.

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