"With over 20 applicants for every affordable apartment, architects can design just about anything and because the rent is cheap and the building is new, it will be rented," states Michael Pyatok in H. Jane Lehman (1996). Pyatok is head of Oakland-based Pyatok Associates, which designs approximately 400 units of low-income housing a year on the West Coast. "Consequently, architects have felt free to design for their peers and their ideology, but invariably we have torn those things down" (Lehman 86). Pyatok approaches the problem by including in the design process the neighborhood from which the tenants are likely to come. For example, the architects recently met every two weeks with community members living near the site proposed for a project in San Jose. At the meetings, groups of Latinos worked with modeling kits to experiment with apartment and site possibilities. Surprisingly, all the groups settled on the same category and chose the same two images out of the four offered.
Obviously, low-income housing is smaller and denser than market-rate developments. It is necessary to accomplish the economic trade-offs while avoiding the "danger of making these places unworkable," explains Avi Friedman (1997), director of the Affordable Housing Program at the school of architecture at McGill University in Montreal. The program goes beyond examining issues of affordable housing by actually developing new prototypes as well.
A large part of the secret to designing affordable housing is creating efficient floor plans. "I have just gotten good at putting units together so there is no wasted space," says architect Daniel Soloman (Lehman 86). Other important issues are good access to daylight and views, says Joan Goody of Goody Clancy & Associates in Boston. Goody is proficient at creating four bedrooms out of the same space devoted to two in market-rate projects.
Architects should not forget about design details of housing for poor people. "Affordable housing does not cost any less to build," asserts Goody, "and it is a myth to think that it can" (Lehman 87). Many of Goody's projects mix low-, moderate-, and upper-income residents together without making obvious distinctions among the units. "It is not normal for people to live segregated by income" (Lehman 87).