A House For All Seasons

Our shelter system thrives on instability. Developers, builders, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and bankers profit when the market for shelter is in churn. For those too young to remember there was once a process called "block busting".

Move a black family into a stable white middle class neighborhood, excite fear that property values are going to be adversely affected, and watch the neighborhood change its complexion. The opportunity that arises for persons of less sophistication to now move up and out of the ghetto sets the stage for a sub-prime housing debacle. Lenders prey on people desperate to own a piece of the American dream.

The system requires demand. Natural disasters are pre-conditions for renewed housing demand. As are relaxed immigration standards for persons of means, or relocation programs on the part of employers. Nothing was as beneficial to the building industry as divorce. During the turbulent years in the later half of the 20th century new home formations generated by divorce drove the industry.

Looking to externalities to describe contributing factors of our housing crisis will not lessen the impact of cultural shifts regarding our shelter. In fact, when was the last time anyone referred to housing as shelter? We have commodified shelter. Housing is now an investment. The fact that at any given time a house is calculated as either a good or bad investment points up the cultural shift away from shelter as a necessity, to housing as something that is to be traded.

The idea of house as a tradable commodity is built into the modern system of shelter supply. We promote "starter" homes without giving a second thought to the implications of the process the buyer commits to once having "started".



As long as the industry could suggest that the buying and selling of housing was a good investment, then trading up was a positive social behavior. Up had many connotations. Up might mean bigger, showier, the trophy house. Up might mean our family is growing and we need a bigger house. Up might mean near to or within a neighborhood that has status. Here's a fun forum re. Beverly Hills as an example.

No matter what the motivation, the move occasions the loss of fundamental family values: The wrenching of the kids from school, the abandoning of friends, shifting of commerce from one set of stores to another, and most importantly the atomization of the family.

The re- release of the film Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is heralded as contemporary in the VSL announcement:
With its rerelease on DVD (available 2/23), Make Way for Tomorrow has another chance to be appreciated. The film’s Depression-era plot couldn’t be more timely: An elderly couple must move in with their children after losing their home to the bank. Separated and out of place, these grandparents not only disrupt the lives of their children and grandchildren—they’re miserable themselves. http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/1469/DVD/tomorrow-is-today/?tp
The reuniting of the family in the above scenario is portrayed as a negative.

Like so many facets of the new economy that have blown up, the housing bubble burst could be a precursor to a reexamined set of premises. What if we explored the millennium old tradition of multi-generational dwelling, not as a burden that one has to escape but rather a support network that can be trusted. I remember the first time I heard the phrase "home place". My auto mechanic in the Shenandoah Valley and I were becoming friendlier and he wanted to cement the relationship with a long pull of brew on the porch of his home place up in the hills. Five generations had been born and raised there and it was never to be sold. It served as a home base in tough times. Family could settle in and await the next opportunity without going homeless or uprooting.

Circumstances are creating similar situations for people who thought they had "outgrown" extended family. Boomerang adults are moving back in with mom and pop, children are assuming responsibility for the senior care of their parents, and grandparents are becoming day care providers. These are not negative practices. The key to the success of these activities is not to stigmatize them. Not to allow the media or the industrial housing barons to determine what is right for us. Some enlightened professionals can see the writing on the wall, but have yet to come up with solutions. We needn't wait for them.

I have addressed the possibilities of granny flats in this space.

That is but one form of housing modification that would work. It turns out that larger, higher end housing stock is suffering a slower recovery and is probably headed for steeper price adjustments. This could be the exact moment to pool resources and buy the homestead, a "forever house". The housing would have to be modified. Modifications to an overbuilt suburban McMansion might include child proofing, sound proofing, increasing accessibility, creating privacy zones, and reconfiguring common spaces to pool resources like computing power or entertainment centers.

I don't think the highest hurdle to such reconfigurations is physical. I think that a great many of us are victims of cool. We would rather die then live in a suburban setting. If we are going to create sustainable, stable futures for ourselves we are going to have to get smart about space, money, and a restored set of family values. Richard Florida isn't going to write a book suggesting creative types should live in a suburb, but the Coastal Conservation League may provide an example of context. They propose retrofitting existing suburbs into livable places. Theirs is but one example of planners trying to save what's left of the landscape by building up what already exists on the grid. Now its up to designers and builders to retrofit the individual house on that grid to make it livable.

Maximizing the built environment

A scenario:
Barbara is a single mom who got herself behind the eight ball. Her husband died from a sudden heart attack while jogging. They had no life insurance. To help her with cash flow she refinanced her modest three bedroom, two car garage home in middle America using an adjustable rate mortgage. The way it was explained to her, "when the affordable rate is about to adjust, we will refinance again, and the monthly payments will remain the same". The problem is that when the adjustable rate reset, there was no bank ready to refi her loan and now she was saddled with a mortgage that was breaking her.

Barbara works in human resources at a mid-sized utility company. After her debt service she barely has money left to feed her two kids, 3 and 5 years old.. She was very close to foreclosure when a group of three approached her office with a concept for a new small business (house retrofitting for conservation) that they imagined was allied with the utility, and that the utility might want to fund. This was beyond her pay grade and she pushed the proposal up the chain but kept the cover sheet of the proposal in her desk. Weeks later she called one of the principals out of curiosity. No the utility hadn't funded the venture but the group had secured some start up money and was plunging ahead. They were looking for space.

No one can ever trace the sparks that trigger creative energy. What Barbara blurted out was, "would you consider renting my house from me during the working day?" Meetings were had, problems discussed, and the resolution worked as follows: They split the debt service and utilities. For the start-up this was far cheaper than the office options they had explored and far more comfortable. The living room, dining room, kitchen, and one bedroom would be shared by the business while Barbara was at work. Barbara and the kids each maintained a private bedroom. The key to the success of the concept was the separation of stuff in the shared space. Barbara contacted the head of the architecture dept. of a nearby university and posted a want-ad for a design project. A short description was included and of course a student responded within days. In addition to a little money beyond materials what the student needed was a practicum for credit. For that the student required they document the process. No problem.

Barbara suggested the student set up shop in the garage. He did. And what he fabricated was a set of three modular storage cubes on wheels. During the work day they opened to include the work surfaces, and communication storage areas that were needed, and at the end of the day, were secured and rolled against a wall, out of Barbara and the kids' way.

The kicker was that when the project was finished, the student suggested that he could retrofit the garage and create an apartment for himself in the space. He did. You will be pleased to know that Barbara is secure in the house, the start-up has positive cash flow, and the city certified the garage as a legal ancillary space.

Vertical Neighborhood

This image from a Dwell Blog re. the proposal by Axis Mundi for a new tower in NYC suggests these ideas are taking hold. Comments on that posting demonstrate how difficult it is to break with conventional thought.

Gimme Shelter

Allison Arieff in her review of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney last fall highlighted the following quote:
“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It’s time we gave this some thought.”

If you accept no other aspect of this man's work you have to admit he was great at naming the problem. Fuller was obsessed with how people were housed. You will read how he wanted to maximize efficiency and was concerned with how compact we might live.

WE have a shelter crisis. It exists at all levels of the economic spectrum: We have the obvious problems of intractable homelessness, we have the new homeless that have been foreclosed upon, and we have the ironic situation of huge scale housing being wildly inappropriate for its intended purposes, while millions can't afford to house their most basic needs.

The solutions that are most often posed to these problems involve the design of yet more housing, most often single family variants as pointed out in Ms. Arieff review of Home Delivery in the same blog post above.

I don't believe we can build our way out of this problem. Nor do we have to. I think Bucky was on to something in the above quote and yet he never addressed it; the psychological imprint we place on space that limits it use. An office is an office, a bedroom a bedroom, a gymnasium, a classroom, a church, are all fixed in their use because we have assigned them an identity. When they are not in use for their intended purpose, they are vacant.

The Sears Tower, the biggest office building of them all, is about to undergo a massive renovation to "green" the building. 350 million dollars are going to be spent retrofitting this massive structure. To comprehend the scale consider The Sears Tower’s 4.56 million gross square feet (3.8 M rentable) would cover 105 acres if spread across one level. This is the equivalent of 16 city blocks in Chicago. This building has become the ultimate potential new monopoly board space and has changed hands many times in the last decade. The economic fact is that the building has never been more than 2/3 occupied since it was built.

The Sears Tower, and many like it, enjoy a "mixed use" zoning designation. It allows owners to rent lower floors to retail tenants. It does not include residential uses. In the early days of loft conversion in NYC, occupants had to blanket their windows else they might be discovered living in commercial spaces. When they hit critical mass, enough persons were in place, the blankets came down and the city was forced to accept the fact of this new use. Lofts were retrofitted for safety and other smart conforming changes and the model is now established. The zoning regulations in most cities prohibit the integration of residential land office uses within the same structure. A quick read spells out the problem and though the cited organization is directed to affordable housing options, their solution is applicable across a broad band of housing price points.

We can only imagine how much greener (and more economically viable) The Sears Tower would become if the full potential of this vertical city were to be realized. What if tenants had the choice of purchasing living spaces within their work environment. They would commute by elevator. What if those same tenants had educational opportunities available for their children throughout the building. What if the retail stores included the gamut of whole life products that satisfied tenants needs for food, pharmacy, and entertainment. Ironically none of these concepts is particularly creative. The developers of the Tower are proposing to build a 500 room hotel next door. If successful, we can imagine that all of the functions of an integrated living/working shelter we propose as an ideal will be achieved within the "imprint", hotel. People will be in residence, others will be at work in different rooms, still others will be dining, or working out, and still others will be attending seminars in banquet rooms. So we have de-facto zoning in place that accommodates our needs for maximized shelter for the 21st century. We simply have to declare that our structures are hotels.

A survey of the vacancy rate of our nation's city office spaces suggest that there are millions of square feet available for occupancy. The next shoe to drop in the ongoing fiscal crisis that is paralyzing our economy is the problem of high debt leverage in the commercial office market. We can foresee still higher vacancy rates and failed buildings as the debt cannot be rolled over. One way to head off that crisis is to maximize the affected buildings, helping them realize their rent potential. To achieve that goal we need to enlighten local governments to embrace creative new uses for these spaces and in so doing, go to great lengths to solve our "shelter" crisis.