Smart Connections: Green Affordable Housing And City Planning

Architect Sam Davis speaks of architecture as a field residing in the public realm to be harnessed for the betterment of the built environment. He points to the history of affordable housing in the United States with its many design flaws and failures, and calls for a drastic re-thinking of the importance of good design in affordable housing as a basic human right. Architecture is public domain. Even the private house makes use of our diminishing natural resources and is affected by many individuals, laws, and institutions. As material resources dwindle further and more people become involved in various aspects of building, the problems grow in complexity and in their interdependence. Nowhere in the field of building and architecture is this more true than in housing. For those interested in architecture and its relationship to society, the place for fruitful investigation is housing (Davis, vii). Among the movements to mitigate sprawl, provide viable low-income housing, attend to declining inner city cores, and develop and grow in more environmentally sensitive ways, there are many places of disconnect, that, if bridged, could yield a more sustainable model of development - economically, environmentally, and socially. If approached separately, only short-term solutions are likely to develop. For instance, growth boundaries and downtown revitalization--while very important alternatives to sprawl style development--often do not account for and thus negatively impact the affordable housing stock. Affordable housing has been through many incarnations of poorly planned or just outright bad designs that have taken a toll not only on the health and well-being of the residents, but on the urban fabric and social equity of entire regions. In addition to being uncomfortable, unattractive dwellings unfit for human habitation, too often they have been developed without adequately accounting for the myriad of uses and services that must co-exist to yield viable living environments. Finding the glue that could potentially bring together these movements to function synergistically could render them all stronger and more effective. Following Davis, housing, as "the place for fruitful investigation," can be the seed for a type of development that could overcome the lack of sufficient communication between these movements. Specifically, green affordable housing speaks to a number of those movements all at once. It demands quality housing for low-income households and sensitivity to the environment, which in turn breeds healthy city planning trends including building and land recycling, transit oriented development, walkability, connectivity, and community development. Following the premise that green affordable housing is an impetus for a broader model of change, I will focus on the how's and why's of green building for the bulk of the paper in order to demystify this buzz word and situate green building within reach of the affordable housing industry and other movements toward more livable cities. Once a clear framework for green affordable housing has been established, the remainder of the paper will be dedicated to an on-the-ground look at holistic city planning founded on sustainability and affordability in a project called the Cleveland Eco-Village.Master of City and Regional Plannin