urbanfabric

100K House

I've been thinking about affordable housing a lot lately. Perhaps because New Jersey is caught in a debate about new yet-to-be-adopted COAH rules. Perhaps because I wonder how much longer I have before I'm priced out of buying anything within 2 miles of our current apartment.

In the US, "affordable housing" has become synonymous with "public housing," relegated to the poorest of the poor. However, these days when someone's talking about finding affordable housing they may mean just that. Housing that the average person can afford. How do the working poor, or even the middle class, afford to live in the communities where they work, where they grew up, or where the better schools are? Municipalities like to call it "workforce housing," hoping to avoid the stigma of subsidized housing.

Rather than create a burden for Muncipalities to figure out how to fund housing for the middle class, I think it's a great challenge for architects, developers, and builders to find a way to develop market-rate, affordable housing. Oh, and shouldn't it also be sustainble? Of course! Otherwise, it wouldn't really be a challenge.

Postgreen, a young developer in the East Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, is trying to build an infill house that's not only affordable, but also LEED certified and modern (no Colonial reproductions here!). The 100KHouse will be a 1,000 sf modern home with a $100,000 construction budget. I am certainly keeping a close eye on its development.

Labels: 100KHouse, affordable housing, planning rant

posted by marthadotcom @ 1:15 PM