Affordable housing is a necessary obsession in our cities, and the entire first section of “Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture and the Future of Affordable Housing” reminds why it should be – that economically the nation is headed for disaster – while making it just as clear in the next sections that there are no great answers immediately available. There are examples and explanations aplenty of problems and pain points in this handsome anthology, including the complexity of compiling enough money for housing projects and the equally labyrinthine task of getting people into those homes, which will soon enough expire as affordable and turn market-rate (or too often just decay). Yet the problem isn’t just the housing fitting a legislated technical category of “affordable” as defined by percentage of average median income; that percentage keeps rising and the stock of housing nationwide keeps going down.
In the middle section come points of view, including a chapter by a for-profit developer who explains well the difficulties built in to the inclusionary model, in which renters paying full fare help subsidize affordable units. It would be this chapter 60 Ellery St. developer Mike Tokatlyan might have wanted to show project neighbors June 6 in saying “When someone doesn’t understand the cost involved, he just attacks the developers as being greedy. Please break it down for me on paper and show me how it would be possible to build [every unit as] affordable.” Solutions seem literally far off, in that the book pines for the social housing being put up in Europe (meaning it’s built as a public good without the complication of profitability, and the affordability of the homes never expires), but this is just as distant politically as geographically for the United States.
The book ends with some optimism in a discussion of mass timber, a carbon-friendly wood product that has plenty of pluses and is proposed for use at 2072 Massachusetts Ave., an all-affordable project with 73 apartments over 12 stories. The lighter, prefab products make for shortened construction, fewer trucks and less noise, with entire projects “literally put together with long screws using electric screw guns, so there’s no heavy drilling,” said Simon Mance, of the project’s Korb Architecture firm. (Some residents have raised concerns about the chemicals used to bind the wood, but there have been no reported problems at Milwaukee’s 25-story high-end Ascent building, which was made with mass timber and opened in 2022; developers there are looking at projects that go even higher.) The 2024 book, edited by architect Alexander Gorlin and architect historian Victoria Newhouse, has even more optimism to offer in a final section, a portfolio of affordable-housing projects from around the country. All the optimism is implied, though, in that seeing what is possible doesn’t make it so.
A copy of “Housing the Nation” is listed as available at Porter Square Books and can be ordered there and at Harvard Book Store. $35.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.