Design Center for American Urban Landscape

Design Brief, Number 7 / August 2003

The Face of
Affordable Housing, Part II

Nancy A. Miller, Design Center Research Associate

 Design Briefs
The Face of Affordable Housing
Nancy A. Miller, Design Center Research Associate
The reality of affordable housing today is that it
need notand often does notlook different
from market rate housing. If well designed and
innovatively financed, affordable housing can be
seamlessly woven into any community. From
planners to designers, and developers to policy
makers, most people agree that we must do a
better job than in the past at designing and
providing affordable housing. Sam Davis, in his
book, The Architecture of Affordable Housing, stated,
If we want affordable housing that fits
comfortably into the community, that bestows
pride and a sense of self-sufficiency on its
occupants and helps them assimilate into that
community, then we cannot continue to build the
stripped-down subsidized projects that we have
come to accept as low-income housing. The
deterioration and abandonment of subsidized
housing, much of it less than twenty years old,
has proven this approach unworthy and unwise.
(Davis 1995, 6364)
Increasingly, affordable housing units are not
segregated, but are integrated into developments
that provide housing and amenities for residents
with a mix of incomes. At the lower-cost end of
the spectrum of affordable housing, HUD now
advocates dispersing former residents of housing
projects, and integrating them with the rest of the
housing market. HUD sets Fair Market Rents
(FMR) for metropolitan areas around the nation,
and distributes housing choice (Section 8)
vouchers that low-income households can use to
make up the difference between what they can
afford to pay, and the FMR. However,
throughout the 1990s, as HUD was tearing down
its many publicly-owned units and displacing
residents, housing prices shot up dramatically.
Rents typically far exceeded what HUD
established as fair market, and many landlords
declined Section 8 renters, because they had a
ready market of applicants who were willing and
able to pay more.
2 Design Center for American Urban Landscape
Out of that situationand other market factors
emerged the current affordable housing crisis. As
documented in the design brief, The Face of
Affordable Housing, Part I, today the shortage of
affordable housing affects middle-income
working families as often as low-income renters.
The first report of the Twin Cities Mayors
Regional Housing Task Force (2000) stated,
Affordable housing is not a separate class or
type of housing that makes it different from
ordinary housing. It is ordinary housing [and]
roughly half of home owners in the Twin Cities
live in affordable housing. (Mayors Task Force
2000, 2)
Although affordable housing exists in the market,
getting new affordable housing built is often a
special challenge. In the central city, there is
political will, but development costs are
prohibitive; in the suburbs, where land is cheaper,
a lack of political will and community NIMBYism
often defeat efforts to build affordable housing.
Nevertheless, from financing to legislation, and
design to construction, financiers, public officials,
developers, architects, and builders are working
to find creative ways to get those needed houses
built. Rejecting the segregated housing projects of
the past, they are looking for ways to build
affordable housing for families, at a range of
income levels, that are integrated into the
community.
A growing number of developments around the
Twin Cities demonstrate that this is possible. This
design brief examines the challenges of building
affordable housingfrom financing to
manufacturingand some recent solutions. It
illustrates projects in the metropolitan area of the
Twin Cities, and provides references for local and
national resources on affordable housing.
Design Briefs
Financing Affordable Housing
As Tom Jones, et. al. note in their book, Good
Neighbors: Affordable Family Housing, the term
affordable refers to the financial capability of
residents, not necessarily to the development cost
of housing. (Jones, et. al. 1995, 63 ) Indeed, one
of the biggest impediments to creating more
affordable housing is the cost of development.
One piece of development costs is the price of
land. In an article in the Minneapolis Southwest
Journal, 619 March, 2003, Robin Repya reported
that locally, in third-ring suburbs, land costs are
$23 per square foot; in Minneapolis land costs
are $2025 per square foot. Former Minneapolis
Council Member Steve Minn, interviewed for the
article, stated that if the city hopes to build
housing that will be affordable to families earning
30 percent of the Metropolitan Median Income
(MMI)1 without subsidies, land prices in the city
would have to be around $.70 per square foot. Of
course, these numbers are linked to the number
of houses in a given area. Increasing density often
increases affordability by making more efficient
use of land. However, high construction costs can
be a factor, as well.
In the same article cited above, Steve Minn
presented market-rate construction costs of
$110,000115,000 for 1,000 square foot units that
demand monthly rents of $1,150 to break even.
Based on 2002 statistics, a family of four earning
50 percent MMI can afford to pay $959 per month
rent. A family earning 30 percent MMI can afford
to pay only $575.
One tool that focuses on the land side of the
equation to increase the supply of affordable
housing is the community land trust. According
to the Institute for Community Economics, which
developed the concept of the community land
trust, A community land trust is a private
nonprofit corporation created to acquire and hold
land for the benefit of a community and provide
secure affordable access to land and housing for
community residents. In particular, CLTs attempt
to meet the needs of residents least served by the
prevailing market. (Institute for Community
Economics n.d.)
Locally, the Rondo Community Land Trust was
established in 1993, in the Summit University and
Lexington Hamline neighborhoods of St. Paul.
According to the organization, home buyers,
purchase the house and enter into a 99-year
ground lease agreement with Rondo CLT for
the land. By taking the cost of the land out of
the real estate transaction, land trust homes
are more affordable than houses on the open
real estate market. Rondo CLT homeowners
agree that when and if they choose to sell their
homes, they will sell to another low-to-
moderate income household and that they will
sell the house for the original purchase price
plus 25% of any increase in appreciation in the
homes value. (Rondo CLT 2001)
Land trusts have the advantage of establishing a
structure to maintain affordability, outside of
often-volatile market forces. The Minneapolis
suburb of Chaska is in the process of creating a
community land trust that will own parcels of
land throughout the city to keep affordable
housing in the community, long term.
Design Center for American Urban Landscape 3
 Design Briefs
Many cities, to get over the hurdles of
development costs, offer developer incentives to
build affordable housing. Often such incentives
are in the form of direct or indirect subsidies,
granted in return for promises to make a
percentage of the developments units affordable.
Both cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul require
that 20 percent of units in rental developments
that receive public subsidies be made affordable
to households earning not more than 50 percent
of the MMI.
Legislating Affordable Housing
Certainly, not all incentives are financial. Many
cities are testing strategies to increase the number
of affordable housing units without spending
public money. Robert Burchell and Catherine
Galley wrote in New Century Housing, a publica-
tion of the Center for Housing Policy, these
incentives can take the form of waivers of zoning
requirements, including density, area, height,
open space, use or other provisions; local tax
abatements; waiver of permit fees or land dedica-
tion; fewer required developer-provided ameni-
ties and acquisitions of property; fast track
permitting; and/or the subsidization or provision
of infrastructure for the developer by the jurisdic-
tion. (Burchell and Galley 2000, 3)
In 2003, the Minneapolis City Council passed
legislation that provides a so-called density
bonus. Developers who make 20 percent of the
units in their projects affordable can build up to
20 percent more units than the current zoning
allows. Cities across the nation provide density
bonuses as a means to achieve housing goals.
These local requirements are part of a practice
called inclusionary zoning, which was pioneered
in New Jersey and Southern California in the
1980s. (Jones, et al. 1995, 44) Inclusionary zoning
incentives may be financial or, as described
above, policy-based.
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Designing Affordable Housing
The extensive need for affordable housing today,
combined with policies that advocate the
dispersal and integration of affordable housing
with marketrate housing have made issues of
design a high priority. Since at least the mid-
1980s, the image of high-density, high-rise
housing projects designed exclusively for
extremely low-income residents has not matched
the reality of affordable housing.
The problems of high-rise, low-income housing
projects are well-documented, and that form of
housing has been fairly discredited by groups
from academics to government officials. Low-
density, single-family suburban homes also do
not fulfill the needs of affordable housing, in
either form or function. Although affordable
housing may take many forms, it is usually built
as low-rise, medium-to-high-density cluster
housing, or small single family homes on narrow
lots.
In their 1986 publication, Housing as if People
Mattered, Clare Cooper-Marcus and Wendy
Sarkissian recognized that such housing held
many advantages for, working parents, children,
and adolescentspeople who are most often
affected by lack of access to decent affordable
housing. Cooper-Marcus and Sarkissians exten-
sive design guidelines in Housing as if People
Mattered, concern such issues as density and
form, community identity, lifecycle housing,
personalization, access to dwellings, private open
space, design for children, parking, landscaping,
safety, and management. (Cooper-Marcus and
Sarkissian 1986) They show that multifamily and
affordable housing, if well-designed and man-
aged, can be assets to both residents and the
larger community.
Design Briefs
In 1981, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) published
the report of the Council on Development
Choices for the 80s, entitled, The Affordable
Community: Adapting Todays Communities to
Tomorrows Needs. That publication, like Cooper-
Marcus and Sarkissians work, long ago
identified the issues that would need to be
addressed, if we hoped to build community- and
family-friendly affordable housing. The Council
on Development Choices recommendations from
1981 are well in line with practices that are slowly
being accepted and applied today. The Council
recommended: encouraging compact
development; creating infill and revitalization
projects; mixing land uses; widening
transportation choices; providing an adequate
supply of affordable housing; and creating urban
villages. (ULI 1981) The recommendations and
guidelines, for the design of affordable housing
from community, to site, to houseare well
established. Only recently, however, in the
current affordable housing crunch, has the
development market begun to respond.
The Minneapolis suburb of Chaska has been a
local leader, especially among third-ring suburbs,
in applying principles like those described above
to new developments, such as Clover Ridge. In
that development, the city wanted to make
housing that would be an attractive asset to the
community, but also affordable to workers such
as teachers and fire fighters, who have moderate
incomes. Applying traditional neighborhood
design principles, the city has implemented many
techniques that appear to point the way to the
future of affordable housing development.
In an article that appeared in the Minneapolis Star
Tribune, 20 January 2002, reporter Steve Brandt
wrote that Chaska allowed the developers to
build three times the number of units typically
allowed, and required that half the additional
units be affordable (a density bonus).
The developers met the affordability
requirements by building on smaller lots3042
feet wideand using manufactured, modular
housing. They also used a technique pioneered
in the late 1940s, in the form of the so-called
expansion attic, leaving space in many of the
houses unfinished, for owners to build out when
finances permit. Using these techniques and
others, Chaska got traditionally-designed homes,
including porches and sidewalks, with prices
starting at $120,000, for rowhouses, and $160,000
for small-lot, single-family homes. The
development also includes 34 small accessory
unitsmost built over garages, which may be
rented or soldas well as rental housing over
retail.
Building Affordable Housing
Following World War II the nation faced a crisis
of housing affordability and availability not
wholly dissimilar from that faced today. Then,
both citizens and the government agreed that the
crisis deserved national action. Architects and
builders responded with proposals to maximize
efficiency and minimize construction costs. Their
proposals examined the nature of the modern
family and its living and housing needs, but
overwhelmingly looked to technological
innovation to make more affordable housing
more widely available.
The Levitts famously applied the concept of the
assembly line to housing production in their
Levittown developments, by dividing the process
into 27 discreet steps, each step with its own
specially trained team that moved from house to
house, performing its task.
In Columbus, Ohio, Carl Strandlund converted a
military aircraft assembly plant to fabricate the
porcelain-enameled steel kits-of-parts that were
shipped to sites around the country to be
assembled into Lustron Houses. The production
and sale of such houses was heavily subsidized
by the federal government,
Design Center for American Urban Landscape 5
 from the loan guarantees of the FHA and VHA, to
the $37.5 million the federal government loaned
to the Lustron Corporation. Although
Levittowns affordable houses were wildly
successful, after only a few yearsand fewer
than 3,000 houses manufacturedLustron went
out of business, unable to repay its debts.
(Baxandall and Ewen 2000, 11314)
Failures such as that one, the limitations of local
zoning, and the negative associations of
manufactured housing with trailer homes, put
the building industry off the development of
manufactured housing for many decades. Only
recently have developers and architects begun to
re-examine ways to manufacture housing
especially applying new technologyto achieve
housing affordability.
Manufactured housing, Chaska
Manufactured, modular housing, such as that
employed at Clover Ridge in Chaska, appears to
be one key to housing affordability. New and
improved modular systems are under
development in many communities, to make that
building technique more efficient, affordable, and
accepted.
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Recently, faculty from the University of
Minnesotas College of Architecture and
Landscape Architecture (CALA), and researchers
from CALAs Center for Sustainable Building
Research and the Department of Wood and Paper
Sciences Cold Climate Housing Program worked
with the Wilder Foundation and the Frogtown
(St. Paul) CDC to develop, test, and build a model
for affordable housing, using new building wall
and construction technology.
Beginning in the summer of 2002, the group
developed a prototype house using a
construction system of panelized OSB (oriented
strand board) that eliminated the need for
traditional stud framing. Construction of the first
house began in the winter of 2003. The wall
assembly, which was fabricated on-site using the
OSB panels, has the potential to decrease
construction time and cost, but has other benefits,
as well. When installed with an exterior vapor
barrier and rigid insulation system, called
PERSIST (Pressure-Equalized Rain Screen
Insulated Structure Technique), the wall assembly
keeps moisture, and its associated indoor air
quality issues, such as mold, out of the houses.
Utilizing techniques such as this one, housing
could be both affordable and sustainable long
into the future. A total of 10 prototype houses
using this system will be constructed in St. Pauls
Frogtown neighborhood. The developer plans to
sell the houses, which are designed to be slightly
less than 1,000 S.F., for less than $100,000 each.
(Weber 2003)
Wilder House, under construction, St. Paul
Illustrating Affordable Housing
For-profit, Mixed-income Developments
Many market rate developments include a
percentage of units that are sold or rented as
affordable. In the Twin Cities there are many
examples of recently built projects that
incorporate affordable units. They demonstrate
how our response to the need for affordable
housing has changed since the much-derided
public housing projects of the mid-twentieth
century were built. Although most of todays
affordable housing developments are new North Quadrant development, St. Paul
construction, some are rehabilitations of existing
buildings. Located in mixed-income
communities, these mixed-income buildings are
well designed and look like typical market-rate
housing. However, in most cases, affordability is
achieved not through differences in design,
materials, or construction, but through financing
and higher densities that bring greater returns on
expensive land.

Creamette Lofts, Minneapolis

East Village, Minneapolis Gaar Scott Lofts, Minneapolis

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 Heritage Park, Minneapolis

Heritage Landing, Minneapolis

Mill City Apartments, Minneapolis

City Homes on Park, Minneapolis

Humboldt Greenway, Minneapolis

City Apartments @ Loring Park, Minneapolis East Village, Minneapolis

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Nonprofit, Mixed-income Developments
CommonBond Communities, a local nonprofit
developer has built and managed affordable
housing units in both city and suburban
locations. The developer places an emphasis on
providing affordable units within these mixed-
income projects.
Valley Square Family Housing, Golden Valley
Cathedral Hill Homes, St. Paul
Lake Shore Townhomes, Maple Grove
Success Family Housing, Minneapolis
Other local nonprofit organizations, such as the
Project for Pride in Living (PPL), have developed
mixed-income projects to create attractive
communities for the location of affordable
housing units. PPLs Portland Place project
renovated two blocks of housing to create 52
market-rate and affordable housing units. In 2002
the project won a Minneapolis Committee on
Urban Environment (CUE) award.
Portland Place, Minneapolis
Links to Local and Other Resources
The examples included here represent a small
sample of affordable housing projects in the Twin
Cities. To learn more about local resources for
affordable housing information, visit the Design
Centers web site, www.designcenter.umn.edu,
and click on the regional resources section of
the reference center. To view a gallery of afford-
able housing projects from across the nation, visit
www.designadvisor.org, a web site created by
HUD and hosted by the Local Initiatives Support
Corporation (LISC).
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 Notes Photo Credits
1. In 2002, the household Metropolitan Median Income All photos, Design Center for American Urban
(MMI) in the Twin Cities was $76,700. Landscape, 200203.

Reference List
Baxandall, Rosalyn and Elizabeth Ewen. 2000. Picture
Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic
Books.
Burchell, Robert and Catherine Galley. 2000.
Inclusionary Zoning: Pros and Cons. New Century
Housing 2:312. http://www.nhc.org/
comm_and_pubs_publication.htm
Davis, Sam . 1995. The Architecture of Affordable
Housing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Greater Minnesota Housing Fund and Cermak
Rhoades Architects. 2001. Building Better
Neighborhoods: Creating Affordable Homes and Livable
Communities. St. Paul: Greater Minnesota Housing
Fund.
Institute for Community Economics. n.d. Community
Land Trusts. Springfield, MA: Institute for
Community Economics. http://www.iceclt.org/clt/
Jones, Tom, et. al. 1995. Good Neighbors: Affordable
Family Housing. New York: McGraw Hill.
Marcus, Clare Cooper and Wendy Sarkissian, et. al.
1986. Housing As If People Mattered: Site Design Design Center for American Urban Landscape
Guidelines for Medium-density Family Housing. 1 Rapson Hall
89 Church Street
Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Minneapolis, MN 55455
Mayors Regional Housing Task Force. 2000. Affordable 612.624.9000
Housing for the Region: Strategies for Building Strong www.dcaul.umn.edu
Communities, A Report of the Mayors Regional Housing
Task Force. St. Paul: Metropolitan Council. Funding for this project was provided by The McKnight
Foundation.
Repya, Robin . 2003. Affordable housing at $158,828 a
pop. (Minneapolis) Southwest Journal, March 619. 2003
Rondo Community Land Trust. 2001. St Paul, Design Center for American Urban Landscape (DCAUL)
MN: Rondo Community Land Trust. http:// College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
University of Minnesota
www.rondoclt.org/
Urban Land Institute. 1981. The Affordable Permission is granted for non-profit education purposes for
Community: Adapting Todays Communities to reproduction of all or part of written material or images,
except that reprinted with permission from other sources.
Tomorrows Needs. Washington, DC: Urban Land Acknowledgment is required and the Design Center requests
Institute. two copies of any material thus produced.
Weber, William. 2003. Interview by author.
The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that
Minneapolis, MN, June.
all persons shall have equal access to its programs,
facilities, and employment without regard to race, color,
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