GREEN TO THE PEOPLE: Low-income housing and sustainable architecture

KCET Online. OCT 2008. By Christopher Hawthorne

For this edition of Web Stories, we decided to turn the spotlight away from glitzy green design and look instead at the intersection of sustainable architecture and affordable housing. That intersection, it turns out, is busier than you might realize, and in the next five to ten years is poised to grow even busier. We developed material in four categories -- Community, Energy, Materials & Reuse, and Urbanism -- to help explore the ways in which architects, planners, public housing advocates and others are bringing authentic and effective green design to the masses.

Los Angeles is facing a severe housing crisis. Even if the prices of single-family homes drop another 20 or 30 percent, they will remain out of reach for the vast majority of Southland residents. In response, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa unveiled this year an ambitious program to build $5 billion worth of new affordable-housing units in five years.

It is hard to imagine the program succeeding -- in economic or social terms -- if it fails to embrace sustainability one of its chief goals. Making new apartment buildings green is not only a way to cut down on energy use and, therefore, make the buildings less expensive to operate. It can also make small, cost-effective apartments more livable, with better air flow, better daylighting and better connections between inside and out. It can help promote the idea of community and draw connections between how a society takes care of its poorest citizens and how it tends to the health of its planet.

Fittingly, given the tight budgets usually involved, housing that is both green and affordable tends to rely on sustainable design strategies that are more about low-tech lessons than about gadgetry or rhetoric. New technology and high-level research have their place in green-architecture movement. But so do ancient lessons about wisely positioning buildings on their sites to take advantage of summer shade, winter sunlight and ventilating breezes; about materials for walls and roofs that help store warmth in winter and shed heat in summer; and about how the careful design of a residence can help promote health and happiness and a sense of connection to our communities and to the larger world. The people you'll meet in the following stories -- whether they are residents, architects, policy-makers or housing advocates -- help illustrate that in many parts of Los Angeles those lessons are alive and well.

Full KCET Article

COMMUNITY

A growing population in L.A. County, which will have to absorb another 1.5 million residents by 2020, means that density is coming whether we like it or not. How can new housing development in Los Angles use smart architecture and green features to help make that density -- and apartment living -- something residents welcome rather than fear?


Read more & watch the associated video.

ENERGY

Not every sustainable design feature on a new building can be, or should be, visible. Sometimes the smartest architectural decisions about energy-efficiency are impossible to see from the sidewalk. But in other cases conspicuousness is precisely the point. In its design for Colorado Court, the first green affordable housing project in the country, the Santa Monica firm Pugh + Scarpa argue that sustainable strategies and aesthetic strategies can be one and the same. 

Read more & watch the associated video.

MATERIALS

However slowly, America is becoming a recycling culture. We recognize the need, in an age of dwindling natural resources, to use things again or to repurpose them whenever and wherever possible. In architecture, though, sustainability is not only a matter of using salvaged floorboards. It also has to do with taking simple, affordable materials and employing them in ingenious ways.

Read more & watch the associated video.

DENSITY

These days...a growing body of research and design energy is making the case that cities -- or at least well-planed cities -- are among the most efficient ecological organisms ever devised by man. In helping residents share resources, in promoting walkability and in making transit economically feasible, cities can be more efficient than rural areas and far more efficient than sprawling suburbs.

Read more & watch the associated video.