7 Lessons from New York's New Affordable Housing Design Guide

When we think of public housing architecture in the United States, we often think of boxes: big,
brick buildings without much aesthetic character. But the implications of standardized, florescent-
lit high-rises can be far more than aesthetic for the people who live there. Geographer Rashad
Shabazz, for one, recalls in his book Spatializing Blackness how the housing project in Chicago
where he grew up—replete with chain link fencing, video surveillance, and metal detectors—felt
more like a prison than a home. Accounts of isolation, confinement, and poor maintenance are
echoed by public housing residents nationwide.
But American public housing doesn’t have to be desolate. A new set of design standards from
the New York City Public Design Commission (PDC)—in collaboration with The Fine Arts
Federation of New Yorkand the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter—hopes to turn
over a new leaf in affordable housing architecture. Released earlier this month, “Designing New
York: Quality Affordable Housing” discusses general best practices in planning affordable housing
and provides case studies of successful affordable housing projects already completed in New
York, many of which were designed by high-profile firms like Ennead and SHoP Architects. While
the document serves as “a reference for New York City agencies and their applicants seeking
guidance on affordable housing design,” it’s written in language accessible to people outside of
design professions and has been publicly released with the goal of empowering “citizens and
community organizations to demand design excellence in affordable housing projects in their
neighborhoods.”
The report comes six months after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in November 2017 that he
would build and preserve 300,000 affordable housing units by 2026. His plan—which is an
updated version of a 2014 plan set to be finished ahead of schedule—will “preserve the
affordability of 180,000 units of existing apartments and build 120,000 new ones.”
Architects designing those new units over the next few years will take cues from the design guide.
But architects worldwide can learn from the document, too. Here are some key takeaways
from Designing New York:
1. Be creative with massing and respectful with scale

Deviating from big-block high-rises that dominated American public housing for
decades, Designing New York recommends breaking up massing within a building to allow
variation in units and creativity within the zoning code. The Creston Avenue Residence in the
Bronx uses unconventional massing to match neighborhood scale (mostly five-story apartments
buildings) while maximizing the number of units offered. In that project by Magnusson Architecture
& Planning, street frontages “align with adjacent older residences and echo their smaller scale,
while the center portion, clad in metal panels, pulls back to create a generous covered entrance."

2. Design with the neighborhood in mind by integrating absent services

When low-income neighborhoods lack supermarkets with healthy options and venues for physical
activity (like parks and gyms), consciously-designed public housing can fill in some of these gaps
to improve the health of building residents. At Arbor House in the Morrisania neighborhood of the
Bronx, wide stairwells are designed with natural light to encourage use; likewise, an on-site
hydroponic rooftop garden meets residents’ produce needs.

3. Don’t make affordable housing “look” like affordable housing

Too often, the divisions between public housing and market-rate housing are made clear by
visually differentiated structures. When affordable housing is marked with pejorative architecture,
residents can become stigmatized or ostracized from the broader neighborhood. Les Bluestone,
an advocate of innovative affordable housing and co-founder of Blue Sea Development
Company says, “The best role that design can play is to not define buildings as affordable
housing. Anything that we can do to get away from that helps the community.”
4. Structural innovation can overcome a difficult site for the benefit of residents

In a city as built-out as New York, many new affordable housing projects occupy odd parcels of
city land. Frost Street Apartments in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for example, sits adjacent to the
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a six-lane highway. In order to mitigate noise disturbance in the
apartments, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects employed “high-performance windows and a heavy
masonry and concrete structure.”
The Schermerhorn in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill offered similarly difficult conditions, sitting atop two
subway lines. According to Designing New York, “building…over the two subway lines that run
below the site required a truss and cantilever structure that took up the majority of the construction
budget.” The result of building on a difficult site, though, is 109 units for formerly homeless people
and people living with HIV/AIDS.

5. Green building is about more than just sustainability

Reminiscent of the vernacular courtyard apartment, Navy Green employs varied building forms
(townhouses and high rises of varying sizes) around a central courtyard. Residents, in turn, have
access to fresh air, natural light, and green space outside their window, regardless of their unit’s
location in the complex.

6. Design won’t solve everything

The Designing New York report offers a promising paradigm shift away from confining
architecture and towards community-building architecture, but it’s important to remember, in all of
this, that well-designed public housing will help, not solve New York City’s housing crisis. The city
continues to struggle with its definition of affordability, which relies on skewed median incomes
for the New Yorkarea. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development has also come
under scrutiny this month for their policy on resident selection. And as low-income New York City
residents are pushed out of their homes every day, even a substantial commitment from the city
to build new units will likely be unable to keep pace with displacement.
7. Different cities (and countries) need their own design solutions

While we should admire New York City’s attempt to provide dignified housing for low-income
residents, architectural history shows us that public housing can’t follow a one-size-fits-all model.
If the success of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, France in contrast with the similar
(but failed) Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis, Missouri is any indication, different regions
need different kinds of public housing. The Designing New York report is conscious of this fact,
encouraging site-specific, resident-specific projects. Let’s remember that even if the Frost Street
Apartments are great for Brooklyn, they shouldn’t be plopped down anywhere in the world. The
lessons we learn from these projects’ attention to residential needs, however, should be broadly
applied.