In the Bronx, Green - and Beautiful! - Affordable Housing

Disclosure: I profiled WHEDCO for a Ford Foundation-MIT environmental justice conference last year.

Yay! I love success stories, or promising stories:

Since March 10, Ms. Prince has been living in an apartment in the Intervale Green complex, on Intervale Avenue between Freeman Street and Louis Niñe Boulevard, an infamous strip of South Bronx urban blight (it served as backdrop for some of the most gruesome scenes in the movie “Fort Apache, the Bronx”)...The building, developed by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, or Whedco, a Bronx nonprofit group, opened to qualified low-income residents in February, and has filled about a third of its 128 apartments...Designed with a large, glass-windowed lobby, two green roofs and a sculpture-filled courtyard, the development, tasteful, sparkling and eco-friendly, could give many cookie-cutter luxury buildings a run for their money.

The tone of this article from the NY Times is amusing: the author is like, what?  Poor people can have luxury too?  Wait a minute...Is this sensible social and economic policy?

At this scale, it certainly is.  WHEDCO has an array of government, philanthropic and community-based partners, all of whom are looking to this construction as a potential model for future green affordable housing.  It's when we decide if we want to take this effort to scale, will we put the necessary resources behind it - that's the question.  Along with: what exactly do we mean by scale?

And not to mention: how do we balance form and function in affordable housing?

WHEDCO pursued this new building and is retrofitting an existing multi-family property of theirs mainly to reduce the utility costs of their tenants.  The costs were rising at an alarming rate, they told me last year, and the housing risked becoming unaffordable in the near future if changes weren't made.  With this new property, they were able to pre-empt those rising costs by building green from the start: e.g., low-flush toilets, sustainable materials (incl. factoring in transportation costs), energy efficient light bulbs, landscaping, etc.  I also know that Nancy Biberman, the director, felt strongly about beautiful design being an important factor in WHEDCO's properties - that attractive form should not be reserved for wealthier neighborhoods.

I'm ambivalent about design, in part because tastes change (public housing was built in the then cutting-edge, modernist style, for instance).  However, I do believe in striking a balance between form and function, because I know we all want to take pride in where we live and how we live (though mostly I find dignity in the ability to choose how we live).

We have to be careful though not to get carried away with our environmental determinism tendencies - that is, that an attractive design will change (poor) people's behavior.  That's been an assumption behind New Urbanist form that drives so much of the mixed-income housing style (ever wonder why so much of it is pastel?) - that by removing dangerous spaces and adding yards and play spaces, poor folks will conduct themselves differently - gangs can't congregate, middle-class residents will model appropriate behaviors (e.g., wearing suits to work), etc.  But what actually changes "behavior" though removing large numbers of subsidized tenants and bringing in more who can pay market rents that can keep up with the capital and operating costs of maintaining these buildings.

Because that's really it.  There's no reason to remove existing residents from redeveloped properties unless one needs higher revenues to cover the costs of developing and then operating the buildings going forward.  Which one does after paying for the demolition and reconstruction of entire properties.

As beautiful as Intervale Green is now, the question is how WHEDCO will cover its operating costs in the long-term.  Energy efficient properties can help tenants and landlords towards this end, by freeing up funds to maintain a building's beauty for its low-income residents.

(Collage of Intervale Green from WHEDCO's website)