Why the New Social Housing Movement Needs to Think About Design

The wave of proposals for a US version of social housing is impressive, unrelenting, and coming at us in real time. It reflects the enormous frustration with rising rents and lack of tenant protections, unaffordable mortgages and insurance premiums, and few options about how and where to live. Housing affordability moved center stage during the presidential campaigns, and yet the candidates’ proposals largely focused on building more units, not addressing what keeps them affordable. Against this backdrop, elected officials, think tanks, and research centers instead made the case for social housing, advocating for a stronger public-sector role in creating homes that would be permanently decommodified and accessible to a broad range of household incomes.

One of the most memorable moments in this flurry of activity was in late September, when New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Senator Tina Smith proposed the “Homes Act of 2024,” a bill that would set up a new federal authority to build or preserve 1.25 million homes over the course of ten years. They also published an op-ed in The New York Times, the same day that the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank, released “A New Vision for Social Housing in America,” which calls for direct federal loans to be matched by municipal bonds and estimates this would create 350,000 units in five years. This was followed by the NYU Furman Center publishing “The Emerging Spectrum of Government-Led and Publicly-Owned Housing Development Models,” a policy brief which highlights that much of what these social housing proposals advocate for is already underway, even in red and largely rural states like Colorado and Idaho.

This broadly shared excitement over social housing, and a direct public-sector involvement in its production, is astounding. This is especially true given that the existing US housing system relies almost exclusively on tax credits and rental vouchers to incentivize the private sector to provide low- and moderate-income housing. The public sector, in contrast, has been deliberately starved of funding and capacity for decades. Despite the dramatic change in the conversation, however, the social housing movement remains curiously stuck in the established metrics of housing politics. The proposals’ main proof of concept is the number of units produced and the price point at which they will be rented, the funding mechanisms to get there, and the household income levels to be targeted. No one is talking about what, exactly, will be built: no one is talking about architecture. This is a missed opportunity for social housing.

Figure 1: New rental and limited-equity cooperative housing on a former parking lot in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The buildings are developed by the local housing authority on an infill site currently used for a hospital’s staff parking. Units range in size from one bedroom to three bedrooms with adjacent studios, arranged along exterior galleries framing generous courtyards. See plan of a typical residential floor. Above: Interior view of a three-bedroom apartment connected to a studio across a private outdoor space.

Chris Masahiko Moyer, Master of City Planning and Master of Architecture thesis project, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spring 2022.

Old architecture

The most ambitious reference to what architecture and design can do, and should be, is in the report Green Social Housing at Scale, which was the basis for the Ocasio-Cortez/Smith bill. Co-authored by the Climate and Community Project, NYU Gallatin, and SC2, it proclaims: “Green [Social Housing Development Authority] housing would be homes that people want to live in, built with architectural care and innovation.” This simple phrase touches on three important aspects of design: first, desirability and choice in terms of the product; second, a recognition of the labor provided by designers and builders in shaping this product; and third, the possibility of engaging in as-yet untested processes to get there. In other words, the authors are cognizant of design as a product and a process.

Most reports and bills, however, only reference the quantifiable aspects of design: energy efficiency, accessibility, and perhaps amenities like a community room. Design largely figures as an abstraction, a solver of the simplified problem statement, which can be summed up as, “How do we get more for less?” Design is not understood as an essential part of a process that asks how the capital-intensive product of housing will fare over time, or how the design of buildings can contribute to residents’ sense of safety, to their health, and to a sense of belonging. These aspects cannot be captured in unit-count and price-point metrics.

At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez/Smith, CAP, and Furman do call on architecture—or at least its image—to make their case for social housing. A color photograph of three 35-story towers at Co-op City in the Bronx, in a dramatic ground-up view, accompanies the Ocasio-Cortez/Smith op-ed. CAP chose a ground-level photograph of the rear side of several five-story tenement buildings which are typical in older parts of the Bronx. The Furman Center selected a partial view of a slender concrete high-rise under construction amidst and above a built-up Manhattan block. It would be easy to assume these image choices were accidental: the reports needed to go to publication, time was tight, and someone ran with a readily available photograph. But precisely the inattention to architecture, combined with a choice of one image over another, reveals two important things about the social housing movement’s take on design to date. 

On the one hand, the images show how far the conversation about architecture and housing has come. What for decades seemed undesirable is suddenly attractive. Co-op City, just fifteen years ago, was derogatively considered Soviet-style mass housing, most famously by Glenn Beck. Today, the 15,000-unit complex suggests desirable, permanently affordable, resident-controlled housing. Tenements, for much of the twentieth century, symbolized slumlords and poverty, crime and urban decline. Now, they’re the stuff of walkable neighborhoods and mixed-use, economically vibrant communities. The Manhattan tower, too, lays claim to the desirability of cities, the promise of density and growth. But it is also important to point out what is not pictured: no single-family homes and lawns, no new housing in Vienna or radical buildings in Copenhagen. Instead, we are presented American cities in their messiness and even monotony. These structures are not icons; most are not even identified. The architecture of the new US social housing, rather, is about unapologetically embracing density and scale.

On the other hand, these images—of existing housing types, urban-design patterns, and development models—reveal an utter lack of imagination. If social housing is to be a new movement, why are its references so old? Where is the disconnect?

Figure 2: New limited-equity cooperative housing above a rebuilt sanitation garage in Astoria, Queens, New York

Instead of relocating the garage, which has been slated for demolition, the proposal leverages already-allocated capital to rebuild the garage on site as a structural foundation for 96 new apartments above. Floor-through apartments in a range of sizes are made possible through a combination of point-loaded access cores and exterior balconies (above). See plan of a typical residential floor.

Maggie Musante, Master of Architecture thesis project, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Spring 2024.

What’s the hesitation?

Social housing advocates and design professionals tend to make three types of arguments to explain why they avoid talking about architecture. The first relates to political expediency. As June Speakman, Rhode Island state representative and sponsor of multiple social housing bills, has said: “You don’t want to be too dirigiste.” In other words, when you want to get a bill passed, you need to keep it lean, not be too prescriptive, and above all not trip it up with detail that may be reason for someone to reject it altogether. The Democrat and professor of political science at Roger Williams University points out that the quantifiable aspects related to design—adequate ventilation, kitchen configuration, etc.—are already codified in state and local standards, and do not merit a special call out.

The second relates to the baggage of public housing, the country’s first social housing program. Beginning in the 1930s, public housing was implemented based on prescriptive design guidelines, leading to complexes that often looked very different from their surroundings. At first, this housing provided far better amenities than was the norm; due to underfunding, that soon changed. As James Stockard, a long-time public housing advocate, put it: “Pruitt-Igoe did not fail because of the architecture. It did not have the services to run it.” But the fact that “it looked different,” as Stockard says, made it easy to conflate the buildings’ physical design with their social and economic challenges.

Pruitt-Igoe and many other high- and low-rise public housing projects were famously blown up. Beginning in the early 1990s, HUD’s Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program paid for mixed-income redevelopment of these sites. The program was ultimately just as prescriptive in terms of its traditionalist design standards, however. But the takeaway for today’s policy makers has stuck: new publicly-supported development should “fit in” to what is perceived as normal—market-rate, private-sector architecture. Matthew Littell, architect and founding partner of Utile, a firm with a remarkable record of designing affordable housing in the Boston area, agrees with this position. Given the country’s history, design experimentation should not happen “on the backs of poor people.” This is, of course, the experts’ view. There is ample evidence that residents of public housing love, and have loved, their homes, and are resorting to embracing its architecture as a kind of aesthetic resistance.

Finally, there is the issue of cost, or at least upfront cost. Even architects and planners acknowledge that striving for better design in affordable housing can undercut delivering housing at all. Daniel D’Oca, associate professor in practice of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is convinced that “too many ornaments make the Christmas tree fall.” Too often, he insists, advocates and policymakers saddle a wish list of development goals to a single project—from including more parking to sourcing renewable materials—which can make a project financially unfeasible. He points to California where a single unit of new income-restricted housing often costs approximately $800,000 dollars to build, making it a hard sell to skeptics. 

As these positions show, not talking about design is a rational choice for advocates. But not talking about design forecloses the promise of the new social housing: to try something that hasn’t been done, to rise above what the private market has to offer, and to think in the long term.

Figure 3: New rental housing in a former textile mill in Central Falls, Rhode Island

The adaptive reuse of the site is financed by a new state-level development authority. Cutting an opening into the existing structure’s deep floor plates allows for a range of apartment types around shared courtyards (above). See plan of a typical residential floor.

David Shim, studio project in the option studio “Designing the Conditions: The Return of the Public Developer,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, Spring 2024.

Design as process and product

So how to think, and talk, about design? Design is both a product and a process. It not only materializes the product; design is the process that gets us there.

As a product (the building itself), design can recalibrate the relationship between upfront cost, ongoing price, and long-term value. Design articulates the shape and form of rooms, their connections and separations, use and care, intimacy and publicness; the relationship between the inside and outside, the top and bottom, the front and back. Design is about the imaginary that will drive social housing forward, politically, and help it take form, materially.

As a process (the path from idea to implementation), design is a way to explore what is possible, further public debate, and build public opinion. Design articulates the trade-offs, what-ifs, both-ands, and either-ors that put housing at the nexus of society’s contradictory demands, whether between short-term savings and long-term benefits, private gain and public benefit, non-negotiable standards and flexible terms, or the hard stuff that is built and countable—like units—and the soft stuff that makes it livable long term—like management and maintenance.

Making design central to the conversation is key to addressing some of the hesitations with respect to political expediency, the fear of standing out, and cost. Centering a conversation on design will allow the social housing movement to demonstrate that the public investment necessary to make its goals a reality will benefit not only the immediate residents, but everyone, in the long run.

Note on images: The three proposals accompanying this blog are examples of innovative housing development models being explored by a new generation of architects.

Cover image: New limited-equity cooperative housing on a former parking lot in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chris Masahiko Moyer, Master of City Planning and Master of Architecture thesis project, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spring 2022.

Cover image and Figure 1: Courtesy of Chris Masahiko Moyer. Figure 2: Courtesy of Maggie Musante. Figure 3: Courtesy of David Shim.