How Architects Can Help End Homelessness

While social workers, addiction specialists, shelter directors and others work on the front lines to end homelessness everyday, could the real answer lie with a group of professionals sitting in high-rise office buildings, far from the realities of the streets? I'm talking about architects, the people who in large part dictate the way we live.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan is a trained architect himself (with a master's from Harvard — that's no joke). He recently spoke to Architectural Record about the impact that good building could have on transitioning people to housing and keeping them in it. (Thanks to the National Alliance to End Homelessness for pointing us toward the interview.)

"Broadly speaking, our national housing policy has been too focused on home ownership and not enough on rental housing and creating sustainable communities," Donovan said. (Despite this country's longtime love affair with home ownership, renting might be the smarter move anyway.)

Donovan mentions HUD's new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, whose mission makes a lot of sense. It aims to connect housing to jobs and transportation, since, as Donovan says, a large part of the foreclosure crisis was McMansion developments way out in the 'burbs far from job opportunities, which resulted in major mortgages and majorly long commutes to work or to interviews. "The federal effort to support sustainable, smart planning, at both the local and the regional level, is a major priority for this administration — and architects and urban planners will play an incredibly important role in that effort," he said.

So it's not just important that affordable housing exists (which, by the way, Secretary Donovan, not nearly enough of it does), but it's important that it's centrally located, so families struggling to get their footing can easily walk, ride buses or drive to work, to a grocery story with fresh food and to schools and medical centers. When more than 50 percent of the average American family's budget goes to housing and transportation, it makes sense to think of how those things can work together to keep costs down. Right now, mortgage applications don't even ask about transportation expenses, the second biggest hit for families.

For a long time, Donovan says, architects have been distanced from community input and from the quest for affordable housing, and reconnecting the profession with that social mission is imperative to our recovery. "For too many years, we've effectively marginalized affordable housing: we've marginalized it in the design professions, and we've marginalized it in the way we build public housing." Now's their chance to make an impact rather than try to win design awards. Will they take it?

Photo credit: Will Scullin