🏡💚 Beautiful, high-quality, green social housing
This Week in Green Social Housing
July 26, 2024
What do you think of when you hear ‘social housing’? In the US, the term ‘social housing’ is mostly unused and unknown, and even if you are in the know, we have a very small social housing sector. You might think of a community land trust you know, or maybe a housing cooperative. More likely than not, if you have any picture of what social housing is, you probably think of our public housing projects.
This leads to one major challenge for the movement for social housing and publicly-owned housing: the existing stigma and bias toward thinking that it will not be high-quality. What comes to mind, especially in America, are crumbling and poorly maintained public housing buildings. Of course, these buildings are in disrepair because of decades-long systemic and ideologically-motivated disinvestment of our public housing. Our stigma against public housing is in many ways a testament to the success (from their perspective) of that right wing assault on the public provision of social needs, and the accompanying move towards the private market.
Because of this legacy, part of the work for the social housing movement is a strong effort to not just assert that social housing will be beautiful in the future, but to highlight beautiful green social housing that exists right now. Last week, the Guardian published an article showcasing social housing projects that are “putting design first.” It’s written from an Australian perspective, and captures many of the ways in which social housing sector can unlock architects, designers, and planners to achieve a broad range of social goals.
In the article, professor of architecture and head of the University of NSW’s school of the built environment, Philip Oldfield, says “with social housing, you’re not trying to create a profit so you can consider things like the life cycle costs for housing in a much more significant way.”
He talks about how this changes our orientation to how we think about designing homes. “In conventional market-led housing, you build for the people who purchase the house … so you don’t consider as much the energy bills that are going to accumulate over time.”
These two quotes point to the inherent compatibility between social housing and sustainability — something the market is notoriously incompatible with. While market-driven housing is bound to create external costs that are borne by the rest of society, social housing is much more likely to be designed to account for and reduce those costs.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and these newsletters aren’t that long, I think it’s best to show a few examples of beautifully designed green social housing, rather than just talking/writing about it. There are a lot of really cool and interesting projects to check out, but here are just a few that I’ve come across:
Carabanchel (Madrid, Spain)
Built in 2007, this project uses bamboo to create semi-outdoor terraces with sliding bamboo shutters. Spain has a number of social housing projects with experimental designs, like Mirador’s mid-building communal patio, or the retro-futuristic 120 Parla.
Sonnenblumenhäuser (Vienna, Austria)
These “sunflower houses” were built within 11 city blocks, housing different unit types of unit. The walls are made of porotherm – an engineered clay block – to keep units cool.
Savonnerie Heymans (Brussels, Belgium)
Named after the soap factory that used to occupy the site, Savonnerie Hermans has 42 units of varying types — studios, lofts, duplexes and apartments ranging from 1-6 bedrooms, with architecture as varied as the units. It’s also an example of sustainable development and “passive design,” super-tightly insulated and requiring less than 15 Kw per square meter per year to heat.
There are many more examples out there (this article also some great descriptions and links) that can give us inspiration and also help more people realize that beautiful green social housing is possible. We also need more examples here in California and the US. With the growing CLT movement, projects being envisioned with ULA funding in Los Angeles, and other municipalities thinking about social housing, perhaps one of these newsletters will soon be featuring some exquisite social housing projects in our own backyard.
Last week, I wrote about the reverberating impacts of the Grants Pass decision. As many of you saw, yesterday Governor Newsom announced a sweeping directive ordering California officials to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments. This is inhumane and cruel. As many people have pointed out, it’s also bad policy — what should come as no surprise, research has found that dismantling encampments have little or no long-term effect on a city’s homeless population.
Housing justice and homelessness groups are mobilizing in response, and we’ll be sure to share more information and ways to support as they emerge.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Newsom Orders California Officials to Remove Homeless Encampments (NYTimes)
Putting design first: six social housing projects from around the world (The Guardian)
The Plan to Bring Social Housing (Back) to New York (NextCity)
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