In the Bronx, Green - and Beautiful! - Affordable Housing
Published May 12, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Disclosure: I profiled WHEDCO for a Ford Foundation-MIT environmental justice conference last year.
Yay! I love success stories, or promising stories:
Since March 10, Ms. Prince has been living in an apartment in the Intervale Green complex, on Intervale Avenue between Freeman Street and Louis Niñe Boulevard, an infamous strip of South Bronx urban blight (it served as backdrop for some of the most gruesome scenes in the movie “Fort Apache, the Bronx”)...The building, developed by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, or Whedco, a Bronx nonprofit group, opened to qualified low-income residents in February, and has filled about a third of its 128 apartments...Designed with a large, glass-windowed lobby, two green roofs and a sculpture-filled courtyard, the development, tasteful, sparkling and eco-friendly, could give many cookie-cutter luxury buildings a run for their money.
The tone of this article from the NY Times is amusing: the author is like, what? Poor people can have luxury too? Wait a minute...Is this sensible social and economic policy?
At this scale, it certainly is. WHEDCO has an array of government, philanthropic and community-based partners, all of whom are looking to this construction as a potential model for future green affordable housing. It's when we decide if we want to take this effort to scale, will we put the necessary resources behind it - that's the question. Along with: what exactly do we mean by scale?
And not to mention: how do we balance form and function in affordable housing?
WHEDCO pursued this new building and is retrofitting an existing multi-family property of theirs mainly to reduce the utility costs of their tenants. The costs were rising at an alarming rate, they told me last year, and the housing risked becoming unaffordable in the near future if changes weren't made. With this new property, they were able to pre-empt those rising costs by building green from the start: e.g., low-flush toilets, sustainable materials (incl. factoring in transportation costs), energy efficient light bulbs, landscaping, etc. I also know that Nancy Biberman, the director, felt strongly about beautiful design being an important factor in WHEDCO's properties - that attractive form should not be reserved for wealthier neighborhoods.
I'm ambivalent about design, in part because tastes change (public housing was built in the then cutting-edge, modernist style, for instance). However, I do believe in striking a balance between form and function, because I know we all want to take pride in where we live and how we live (though mostly I find dignity in the ability to choose how we live).
We have to be careful though not to get carried away with our environmental determinism tendencies - that is, that an attractive design will change (poor) people's behavior. That's been an assumption behind New Urbanist form that drives so much of the mixed-income housing style (ever wonder why so much of it is pastel?) - that by removing dangerous spaces and adding yards and play spaces, poor folks will conduct themselves differently - gangs can't congregate, middle-class residents will model appropriate behaviors (e.g., wearing suits to work), etc. But what actually changes "behavior" though removing large numbers of subsidized tenants and bringing in more who can pay market rents that can keep up with the capital and operating costs of maintaining these buildings.
Because that's really it. There's no reason to remove existing residents from redeveloped properties unless one needs higher revenues to cover the costs of developing and then operating the buildings going forward. Which one does after paying for the demolition and reconstruction of entire properties.
As beautiful as Intervale Green is now, the question is how WHEDCO will cover its operating costs in the long-term. Energy efficient properties can help tenants and landlords towards this end, by freeing up funds to maintain a building's beauty for its low-income residents.
(Collage of Intervale Green from WHEDCO's website)
Share this Post
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
EmailRelated Posts
Comments (2)
Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the ideas covered in the posts. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; that contain ad hominem attacks; or that are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion.
Author
-
Leigh is a PhD candidate in urban planning at MIT, and a consultant on U.S. Gulf Coast recovery. She sits on the Board of the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston, and has worked with non-profits, foundations and local governments on policies and programs aimed at reducing urban poverty and inequality.
Featured Poverty in America Actions
-
-
-
Repeal the Hyde Amendment!
88 People
-
Repeal the Hyde Amendment!
This post raises some interesting insights but also some misperceptions about affordable housing.
For one, it does not take an immense budget to build an attractive building. It takes attention to detail and higher standards, and it requires the developer to put him/herself in the role of "consumer" and to ask, at every turn, whether what we're building would be the kind of homes we'd like to live in with our own families.
While Intervale Green may be cutting-edge and green on the inside, WHEDCo chose to build a traditional red brick building with decorative cornices, stone, ironwork and courtyards, all of which are direct references to the architectural history of the Bronx, so much of which was decimated by abandonment, then further victimized by scatter-shot re-building over decades. This building's classic design, completed after a full year of community and public reviews, was applauded by New York City's Planning Commission, City Council and Mayor; it does not reflect any particular design taste du jour.
We do not consider high quality design as a behavior modification tool. Well-designed buildings with abundant natural light and landscaping are what we all look for when we exercise our "choice" about where to live. Regrettably, people without much money also do not have much in the choice department. Typically the choices are between bad and worse. We sought to create a high quality building, seeing it as expanding options for lower income families, not choosing for them.
To the question about Intervale Green's oeprating costs over time: like all other affordable housing, Intervale Green's underwriting is premised on the assumptions of very low rents, low or limited debt service and maintenance and operating expenses tied to local area costs. This $38 million development would not have been financed if we and myriad government and private sector lenders, investors and funders didn't analyze our projected proformas through the next 30 years and determine that the project was financially viable.
Moreover, Intervale Green was underwritten with the assumption that (notwithstanding our energy efficient systems) we would be a typical fuel-guzzling building with high utility bills. As part of a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) pilot program/study, we expect that the building will be about 35% more efficient than a conventional non-green development. If our assumptions prove to be true (along with those of many other affordable green buildings now in the pipeline all over the country) we hope that future projects are underwritten with lower utility expenses, thereby freeing up funds to build more, not less, affordable housing.
High quality design and an investment in green building systems and products should create environmentally sustainable buildings, lower costs and raise expectations all at the same time.
To us, the tenants moving into Intervale Green, and the affordable housing community in NYC, this all makes a lot of sense.
Posted by Nancy Biberman on 05/15/2009 @ 10:46AM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
Hi Nancy! Thanks so much for commenting here!
"High quality design and an investment in green building systems and products should create environmentally sustainable buildings, lower costs and raise expectations all at the same time."
Agreed. I didn't mean to make WHEDCO the example for the behavior modification school, but the departure point for a broader discussion about how some advocates and developers and policymakers think about design and "culture" or behavior. Given I'm familiar with your work, this was implicit to me when I was writing this post. My apologies if it's less clear to the reader.
Posted by Leigh Graham on 05/15/2009 @ 11:24AM PT
You must be signed in to report content.