Architecture for Housing as a Common Good, or I Would Fight Always for Beautiful Housing for All

Andrea Dietz (AD) interviews Karen Kubey (KK)

AD: Support Structures is motivated by the absence, in the United States, of a social contract with the built environment. Its primary entry into this issue is through the most common policy model that encourages creativity in our lived commons—Percent for Art. But Percent for Art is limited, both in its purview and its process. We’re here to talk about an aspect of the built environment that is beyond the purview of Percent for Art, but that is in desperate need of creative address… housing. Would you want to start by describing, in your own words, the housing crisis in the United States?

KK: I think the central issue behind the housing crisis in the United States is that we treat housing as a commodity, for profit, and not as a human right. And, as a main extension of that, the US lacks the social housing infrastructure that is necessary to ensure that all residents are adequately housed.

Looking at the phrase that you’re using—“the housing crisis”—the term has been in active use since the 2009 crash. This was the moment that housing insecurity became a concern not only of the poor, but of the middle class. The global financialization of housing has been a primary driver of still worsening conditions. So, I’m sure the statistics are familiar, but to underscore this, we have record-high homelessness in this country, which has been rising since 2017. The most recent data show that over half of renter households are spending more than 30% of their income on rent—the government definition of being rent burdened. Homeownership is also out of reach for the majority of Americans.

Something that is important to emphasize is that these conditions do not, in my view, represent a failure of the US housing system, but rather they reflect how the system is designed… which is to produce profits for a few and poor conditions for many. This is something that David Madden and Peter Marcuse write about, as well. In this context, my work focuses on what the right to housing would look like in practice—in the US and elsewhere—and how architects might contribute.

One important thing to look at, for too long, our leaders have approached the housing crisis as if it’s just a political and economic problem. And, of course, it is those things. But that approach has failed. And, as a result, millions of Americans are inadequately housed. I believe we must also address the right to housing as an architectural issue and one of spatial justice, or how social justice manifests in the built environment. Such an approach is critical to meet the human needs of residents and to respond to what is not only a political failure, but a failure of imagination.

AD: There are (and, historically, have been) policy models and governmental agencies specifically focused on housing in the United States. What do you consider their strengths and weaknesses to be? What is their role in the housing crisis? And what needs to change in order to bring about improvement?

KK: As an extremely brief overview, this country had direct public housing, meaning federally built and managed housing, from the 1930s through the 70s, when Nixon put a moratorium on it. Of course, there are many historical events between then and now. But, broadly, we now rely on the private market to provide affordable housing through subsidies and tax credits.

So, a public housing strength that we can look to, not just in the past, but today… I’ve spent the last twenty years in New York. The New York City Housing Authority is the largest in the US. It houses somewhere around 400,000 people. This is the only source of truly affordable housing in New York, period—meaning, affordable for people with very low incomes. It is a vital piece of infrastructure now. Its strength is that it exists. And its other strength is that the tenants, in what is called Section 9 public housing, have the strongest housing protections of anyone in the US. Federal Section 9 regulations, for instance, support tenant participation in public housing through governing bodies like Resident Councils. This is why grassroots groups like Save Section Nine in New York are fighting to preserve this specific form of public housing, and against conversions to other subsidized housing programs like Section 8.

We know, then, that a withdrawal of federal funding over decades has left us in a situation where many of these buildings, the vast majority, are not in great condition. This is not good for residents. But we also know that many of the structures were built to high standards; the bones are good. It’s important to note that these are not micro units; they’re not minimum dwellings. They are decent homes for people.

Public housing weaknesses exist, in part, because of the way that the government, at multiple levels, has pulled money away from these assets. You know, if you don’t fund maintenance, things fall apart. But the real problems do not start with public housing post construction. Rather we can locate a major source of this country’s public housing disfunction in its conceptual origins. Here, I look to my hero, Catherine Bauer, someone who worked on housing from many angles. Before we had public housing in the United States, she curated shows on it at the Museum of Modern Art. She wrote the book Modern Housing. She advised something like five presidents. She taught. And she was involved in the creation of the country’s first housing act that brought about public housing in the US in the 1930s. What we know from these US public housing beginnings is that, originally, it was meant to serve a wide swath of the population—not just the very poor, but the working class. The real estate industry, though, from the start, fought back. The result was that public housing became synonymous with poverty. Of course, there are racial aspects as well—which, in our country, reinforces power imbalances. There was segregation at the beginning, in which public housing was available for white families only. And now we have a reality wherein the vast majority of public housing residents are people of color. So, where social or public housing has been more successful in other countries, public housing in the United States is isolated to a marginalized population that cannot resist a government that does not provide proper funding. Going back to Catherine Bauer, she already was writing, in 1957, about the “dreary dreadlock” of public housing, and how what she saw as foundational mistakes led us to such intractable problems.

Okay, so, what do I think needs to change? I talked at the beginning about the rise in homelessness. I believe that, as Gregg Colborn says, “homelessness is a housing problem.” And, what I’m most excited about are several massive movements that have happened recently: for large-scale social housing, huge tenant movements (at a scale we haven’t seen in decades), and movements to establish housing as a human right. There is a movement to establish housing as a human right in the California constitution. We need to establish large-scale social housing; it is the only thing that is proven to work around the world. Now, social housing is a broader term than public housing. It points to housing that is permanently affordable, that communities control. It can look like public housing, or it can look like other models, like community land trusts and other approaches to decommodifying housing. We need to develop social housing in a way that is conscious of the failures of our existing public housing system; specifically, it needs to include a wider swath of the population. Along these lines, it’s exciting to see that, in Seattle, there is a voter-approved social housing development initiative. There is a pilot public developer program in Rhode Island. There is a revolving social housing fund in Maryland’s Montgomery County. Then, regarding tenant action, there is a massive movement in Kansas City. In New York state, Housing Justice for All has had some great wins. And, if we scale all of this up and look nationally, there is the Homes Guarantee platform, the Green New Deal for Public Housing, and a new report from the Climate and Community Institute, Green Social Housing at Scale. All of this is very exciting. And it highlights the change toward a better, politically stronger, spatially just approach to housing in the United States.

AD: This is a bit of a tangent, but I’m thinking about what I’ve heard referred to as a “missing middle.” And, I mean, an architectural middle, a middle scale. There is a prevalence of single-family and mass housing, but a shortage of the in-between. I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add to this observation? Do you see housing scale as another potential locus for change?

KK: Sure. What does the future of housing really look like? I do think missing middle conversations are important. I also think we need to couple them with less of a reliance on the private market. Specifically, some of my research has focused on low-rise, high-density housing, which is a different term that means approximately the same thing. Here, low-rise, up to about four-stories, and high-density, 30 units or more per acre (the definition that I’ve used in my work), is housing dense enough to support public transportation. Of course, we’ve had low-rise, high-density housing for forever. But there was a particular push toward this kind of housing in the 1960s and 70s in response to tower-in-the-park modernism. It was a push not only by architects, but by governments. For instance, in New York, we see the coming together of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, with Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton, with the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a very strong governmental body initiated at the state level in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and lasting until 1973. During that time, the UDC produced 33,000 units of low- and middle-income housing—many of those low-rise, high-density. Now, many of the ideas from that period are not current, but it’s important to look at the model still, because we can see in it benefits for specific situations… for densifying suburbs, city peripheries, etcetera. And, indeed, many places are eliminating single-family zoning to make greater density possible. From a very basic level, density is great for so many reasons. There is a huge element of racial justice in the trajectory. It means that there is access to public transport, to amenities, to the quality of life of a “fifteen-minute city.” Also, it affords access to private green space and connection to the ground. So, thinking about how to combine urban and suburban values together, low-rise, high-density housing has a lot to offer.

AD: Great. Getting back on track… what distinguishes housing as an issue in the built environment? Does it make sense to treat it as standalone? Would you want to bring housing in conversation with other issues in the built environment?

KK: What distinguishes housing as an issue, and I’m going to repeat myself here, is that housing is a human right. I’m speaking from the point of view of international law, codified since 1948. International law also helps us address the other question. Does it make sense to treat housing as standalone? Absolutely not. The way the 1948 law itself is written forwards the notion that housing only works when it is considered as relational.

So, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll list the seven aspects of the right to housing, as codified by the UN: security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, cultural adequacy, and location. There are so many ways to think about housing justice. Why use a rights-based framework? I really like how Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center puts it. He says, “When housing is a commodity, we have to beg for it. When it’s a right, we can demand it.”

Returning then to the question of bringing housing in conversation with other issues in the built environment, it is central to issues of spatial justice, racial justice, environmental justice… for several reasons. Human reasons. Home is where we spend most of our time and where we have a sense of identity. Environmental, physical reasons. Housing makes up the majority of our neighborhoods. And, of course, economic reasons. Where the housing market goes, so go the global financial markets. Let’s look back at the right to housing aspects, too. They intrinsically connect to a broad range of conversations—from those of transportation to education to health to labor, anything that has to do with living, really.

AD: Okay, as a thought experiment, let’s look at housing in relation to Percent for Art. What if we thought about housing as an art? What benefit might there be to dedicating creative energy to housing?

KK: I love this question. It leads to making housing beautiful for the people who live there. That’s exciting. We can also look at this question strategically. What are barriers to having more affordable housing in this country? A central one is local politics… NIMBYism, people at the local level fighting against affordable housing coming into their neighborhoods. Design and beautiful design of housing also works strategically in that way. To look at something like property values, which is something someone fighting against affordable housing might be concerned with, if an affordable housing project is very beautiful, then it’s less likely to bring down property values and also is less likely to elicit a NIMBY fight. It’s more likely to be built.

It's another failure of the American imagination, the inability to conceive of neighborhoods as places that can adequately house everyone. Too many people think: “Well, we’re stuck. This, the private market, is it. There’s a lot of homeless people; we wish there were fewer. But there’s never going to be zero.” Art plus housing upends this assumption.

Why is it important for residents, though? Home, again, is a locus of identity. And, if we connect that to the “cultural adequacy” tenet of the international right to housing, the question of beauty comes to the fore. Since time immemorial, home has been a site of decoration. The call is very human, very basic.

Then, when we’re looking at housing within architecture, it’s too often treated as different from, lesser than, other programs. Susanne Schindler does excellent research into this. I was just looking back at her essay, “Architecture versus Housing,” and she says it better than anyone, so I’m just going to quote her: “Housing—whether modified by the adjectives public, social, subsidized, low-income, workforce, or affordable (or even in its so-called market-rate version)—is considered a socioeconomic product to be delivered at the least possible cost to the public sector, while generating maximum economic benefit to private developers. Architecture, in contrast, is viewed as a cultural endeavor, concerned with museums, universities, or houses, whose economic fundamentals seem not to matter.” This is really important… how housing has been seen for too long as, in the view of many, as separate from architecture. Our challenge is to treat housing as architecture, as well, with the same interest as we treat museums, for example, and more. Because, we, as humans, fundamentally, need housing more than we need museums. Though… I like museums too. No shade on museums.

AD: Similarly, support for the arts and support for housing are rarely considered in relation to one another. But, they, arguably, are deeply interconnected. Art is acknowledged as a gentrifying force that jeopardizes housing accessibility. And housing precarity jeopardizes the livelihood and wellbeing of artists… and thereby the arts. Or, how do you appreciate these interdependencies? Do you see ways of engaging in this dynamic that might lead to the thriving of both housing and the arts?

KK: Right. So, you know, gentrification is a massive and very real issue for many neighborhoods across the country. We are regularly seeing marginalized people, people of color, pushed out. Design has some role in that. We all know it when we see it. We’re in a low-income neighborhood and there’s a new development going up. We see the architectural and cultural signifiers. We perceive very clearly, through design, that a building might be for people other than those around it… for richer people, for whiter people. There is some element of design. Then, there are programmatic questions. Is the development gated, for instance?

But design’s role is very small in comparison to the other issues at play in gentrification. The correct response to gentrification, in turn, is not to reduce beauty, or to reduce how much art is involved. What works are things like government levers, like rent control and social housing. I would fight always for beautiful housing for all. And then use economic levers to ensure that development doesn’t result in displacement.

AD: Closing out. Has this conversation brought to mind any other ideas that you want to discuss or is there anything that we missed that you would want to see considered with respect to housing/arts/policy?

KK: This has been very fascinating. I’ve been grateful for these prompts. This is an exciting new idea to me. We desperately need more funding for housing in the United States. We also desperately need for Americans to see housing as a common good. When I think about the ideas that you’ve brought up, in terms of marrying housing and arts policy, I’m most interested in how these ideas might contribute to those goals.

AD: Yeah, me too…

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Karen Kubey is a New York- and Toronto-based urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture in New York. Currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, Kubey convenes the American Institute of Architects Right-to-Housing Working Group.