housingaffordability

Affordable Housing vs. Housing Affordability

March 16, 2022

In our work, understanding why we build a home in a certain way is key in addressing the fundamental challenges of affordability. And while it is certainly important to ask, “what does a house cost to build?” it is perhaps more useful to consider what a house actually affords.

In other words, what impact might we have on the creation of more attainable housing if we could begin to consider the total cost of homeownership in the overall financial equation? Stated more directly, we have found that many low-wealth homeowners are not primarily challenged because they cannot afford their monthly mortgage payments. Instead, they are more often at risk of missing a payment and perhaps even losing their home because of one or more of the four following circumstances.

First, a homeowner may have an unexpected energy bill. In our part of the world, our homeowners may have an energy bill of $35–45 a month in March and April, and an energy bill of $350–400 in July and August.

Second, a homeowner may have an unexpected maintenance or repair bill. We live in an area of highly volatile climatic activity. Maintenance and repair due to storm-related events and the long-term displacement they often cause play a significant role in the financial security of our homeowners.

Third, a homeowner might have an unexpected healthcare event in their lives. Where you live matters, and living in substandard housing is one of the best-understood negative social determinants of health.

Fourth, a homeowner may face various forms of income disruption. Many rural homeowners rely predominantly on part-time work, shift work, and seasonal work to make ends meet. Additionally, they live in complex kinship networks in which everything is shared, from housing, transportation, and income to food, eldercare, and childcare. Any disruption in these community networks can be disastrous for generations of a family.

So, in addition to managing the upfront cost of construction of the home, it is even more important and impactful to understand how the actual performance of the home in four key areas—energy efficiency, durability and resilience, health and wellbeing, and the strengthening of community networks—all contribute in profound ways to financial and economic security.

Working with our builder partners and homeowners, the Front Porch Initiative provides the information, knowledge, and know-how around each of these instrumental areas to help them make informed decisions regarding both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of building performance, allowing for a clear decision tree that considers the cost and value of action, as well as the hidden cost of inaction.

Below, you see five variations of Joanne’s Home built in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

One of the important aspects of this iterative research is our ability to build multiple versions of each home in various climatic conditions and with different performance objectives as necessitated by our housing partner’s particular circumstance. Taken together, these homes become “Test and Learn Laboratories,” and this iterative process of evaluating both the cost and value of building performance criteria lends itself to a highly customizable process and yields a wide variety of housing options and variations.

Each house we build offers the opportunity to study different issues of efficiency, resilience, wellness, and community building. One of our research questions focuses on finding the balance point between the front-end construction costs of improved performance and the back-end performance consequences in each of these areas. In our next post, we will share a case study of two versions of the product line homes (seen below), and how we use our homes to explore the pluses and minuses of different building standards in their delivery— specifically, we will take a deep dive into the intersection of energy efficiency and resilience, and we will share some of the surprising things we have learned along the way.

Photo credits

Joanne’s Home: Timothy Hursley

AIR Serenbe: J. Ashley Photography

Ree’s Home: Timothy Hursley

AHR Wharf Avenue: Ford Photographs, provided by AHR

Ophelia’s Home: AU Rural Studio

House 66 & House 68, Auburn Opelika Habitat for Humanity: Matt Hall

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Getting Stair Crazy

February 17, 2022

Welcome to the February grind time, where the weather is relentless and so are the 5th-years! As the Spring semester intensifies, Patriece’s Home team is working harder than ever on their project—designing and building an adaptable, two-story house for multi-generational residents.

A panoramic shot of three team members sitting in the Newbern Library courtyard while they have a team discussion.
Lauren Working at her cluttered desk in red barn
Three team members surround their pinned up drawings under the Fabrication Pavilion and make notes.
Three students working at their cluttered desks in Red Barn.

The team was eager to dive into drawing details for the visiting reviewers. The group decided that the roof material should drape over the house and should be a different color and corrugation size than the metal siding. The porch interiors are also clad with wood “like a bite out of the apple,” as Director Andrew Freear likes to say. 

A close image of galvanized 2.5" corrogated medal, 1.25" Brown Grey colored corrogated metal, and planed white oak overlapping each other.
Three students surround siding and roofing samples layed on the ground outside.
An exploded axon diagrams Patriece's Home siding strategies.

Another thing the Studio loves about this time of year is the weekly reviews from visiting architects and friends. Anne Marie Duvall Decker and Roy Decker from Duvall Decker Architects in Jackson, MS, challenged the Patriece’s Home team to consider the home’s performance strategies before they begin construction details; the team was asked to consider fire protection and ventilating the attic insulation in their approach enclosing the attic trusses, as well as to “fine tune” the passive cooling strategies of the home by carefully selecting where fixed and operable windows are located. In response, the team is working to use the chimney effect of the stairs to their advantage.

The team continues to examine ways to keep the home affordable to build, even with a large footprint. Because this house is thermally and functionally divided in half, the homeowner could choose to finish the larger or smaller unit upon construction and finish the other unit when their living needs change (kind of like the Myers’ Home “shell” research).

A one point perspective sketch from the front door side, looking through Patrice's home front porch.
Fours students stand in front of their presentation while Duvall and Decker listen. One student is pointing toward a drawing.
A sketched interior perspective of the Home's kitchen looking toward the stairs. The room is furnished with a table, cabinets, and appliances.

Not long after this review, the team FINALLY got to meet Patriece!! An exterior massing model showed her how the house would look from the outside, and an unfolding interior model helped the team walk Patriece through the home and show her adaptations to each room by moving modeled furniture. And she liked it! With her approval, the team can begin to conjecture how her family will use the home and how further decisions will keep it comfortable throughout her life. 

A student guestures toward a half inch scale interior model of the home.
The team poses with Patriece in front of two models of the home.
A student holds up an exterior massing model of the home in red barn.

Most recently, the team had a day of review and workshops with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien from Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Partners in New York City, NY. They said that the team’s concept was very clear, so now they should loosen up a bit to make the social spaces of the home even nicer and more useful. Tod and Billie also encouraged the team to make spaces at the top and bottom of the stairs that use the light from the dormer window and allow someone to enjoy being on the kitchen landing. 

Four students and three reviewers surround a presentation under the Fabrication Pavilion.
An exterior sketch of the front porch corner of the house.

The team has a lot to work with from these meetings and much to prepare for the meetings to come! They are going to begin surveying the site to find where the best location is to place the home. The team is also going push the house’s details and construction decisions forward as they get closer to the final review of the semester. There’s much more to come for Patriece’s Home—thanks for reading and keeping up with us! 

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What do we know?

November 1, 2021

As part of our ongoing research to better understand the barriers to equitable housing access in our community, Rural Studio students have designed and built numerous affordable prototype houses over the years.

We’ve been working iteratively to develop dozens of prototypes on the ground in Hale County. The following are just a few of the critical lessons that we have learned along the way.

First and foremost, it is essential that a house be designed to be durable, buildable, weatherproof, and secure.

But as important as these basic criteria are, they are just the minimum of requirements. We have also found it to be equally important that a house should be designed to be aspirational as well.

1) A house should directly express a sense of presence and dignity for the homeowner.

Dave's Home with title Presence

2) A house should intentionally foster a sense of community and engagement in its design.

3) A house should actively contribute to the health and wellbeing of those that live in the homes, as well as for those that build the homes.

4) A house should provide opportunities to both age in place with dignity, as well as shelter in place in safety.

And finally, even though our houses are intended for local people, and built with local materials, and with local labor and know-how, above all else,

5) A house must be well crafted.

But knowing these essential criteria is not enough. It is what we do once we know them that matters most. However, the gulf between knowing effective strategies and implementing them is enormous. In medical research, this is often referred to as the “Know-Do Gap,” and we have found it to similarly exist in architectural research as well. In our next post we will outline some of the implementation strategies and communication products that the Front Porch team has developed to begin to narrow this gap between what we know, and what we do.

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