The business of affordable housing mostly takes place on the ground—in the community meetings and architecture studios where our long-simmering national crisis is presently being hashed out and fought over. From LA to Austin, from activists to elected officials, it’s a field mostly dominated by hard-nose pragmatism more than abstract thinking.

But far (seemingly) from the main sphere of action, creative ideas for the future of America’s cities are also emerging from the (supposedly) insular world of academia: the University at Buffalo now offers a certificate in affordable housing; Columbia’s GSAAP launched its Housing Lab in 2019. And now, at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, a new chair—together with a longtime faculty fixture—are preparing to bring their intellectual approach to this pressing real-world problem.

Antje Steinmuller’s appointment to the leadership post at UMich was announced this spring; She’ll officially take up her duties this summer, once she’s packed up the home in San Francisco where she’s lived since arriving from her native Germany in the late 1990s. Helping her settle in is her colleague Sharon Haar, a professor at Taubman for over a decade, trained back East but based in the Midwest for the last thirty years. What the two have in common: housing, a key area of research for both and a subject they’re looking to make an even more integral part of the Michigan program. The two educators talked to Dwell about what’s going on in the groves of academe.

How did each of you first become interested in the problem of affordable housing?

STEINMULLER: After the Berlin Wall came down, property ownership was really unclear in Germany; that invited a lot of citizen participation in the production of urban space, including housing, and I became interested in bottom-up processes, how they can inform what cities do.

In the years after I moved to San Francisco, I watched housing become more and more unaffordable, with people moving here to work in Silicon Valley (that, of course, combined with the city being so resistant to building more density). At the same time, as I was teaching at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, I started to notice all these bottom-up intentional communities that had sprung up around the Bay Area—most of them in the 1960s and 1970s, originally as forms of resistance to the status quo—and I started to research what made people gravitate towards them.

From there I’ve gone on to explore different forms of shared housing, including the ones you see today. A lot of those are more plural sorts of collectivities, like the Embassy Network, which started with just 28 members in an Edwardian Mansion in San Francisco and is now an international community.

HAAR: I’d say that my background is quite a bit different from Antje’s, though we hit some of the same points in our trajectories. My original interest came from studying gender and queer spaces in domestic life. The first studio I ever taught was a housing studio, while I was at Parsons in New York; this was in the early days of architects trying to make a contribution to the idea of supportive housing, finding ways to get architecture out in front of developers and find a more inclusive model for housing.

Shortly thereafter, when I moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, it was a moment where you had the impending demolition of a lot of high-rise public housing, and the reconceptualization of housing around a new mixed-income model. I got interested in exploring how we could further that approach and help support new communities, instead of it just following the cookie-cutter, developer-driven approach. So I did a number of different kinds of research projects, as well as mounting public events and working on some competitions in Chicago. And then I moved to the University of Michigan.

Even with those backgrounds, it can’t be easy importing such a complex topic into the classroom. Or getting students to engage with it.

HAAR: At Taubman, what we’ve managed to do since I got here is to work with the city of Detroit on what we’ve called Systems Studios, a series of housing studios done in collaboration with the city’s Planning and Development Department, where students got to work on sites around Detroit in a way that was really research-focused and speculative but with people from government actually coming to the reviews, and with some of the student’s ideas ultimately ending up in exhibitions in Detroit. Some of the sites we reimagined from about 2015-2020 are now actually being built on, and the final projects have sort of merged with some of the thinking that came from the college.

Systems Studios at Taubman is run in collaboration with Detroit's Planning and Development Department. " layout="" credit="Courtesy of Sharon Haar at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning" photoUserId=""/>

The studios we’re doing right now are a little different—we’re looking more at Ann Arbor, exploring different models for affordability here, things like community land trusts and more transit-oriented development on what are currently the fringes of town. Our affordability problems aren’t as bad as, say L.A.’s, but people are increasingly in danger of getting priced out. I’d say what we’re doing is using student work to illustrate what could be, and what could happen if we don’t look for solutions in housing.

So what are your future plans for the program at Taubman—and how does housing figure into them?

STEINMULLER: It seems like there are all these opportunities to bring out the excellent strands of research that already exist at the university, and to bring them together. And then there’s simply being in Ann Arbor and so close to Detroit, which both have housing issues that are unique but that I believe have lessons that could prove applicable to other places. I also think the question of climate change and how that affects housing is a really pressing one. Being in Michigan means having all these other experts present to tackle these questions through interdisciplinary collaboration—something I'm really hoping to foster, because with housing, there are so many angles that need to be considered.

One angle not so often talked about is connected with our assumptions about family types: in most housing debates, people bring all these very conventional assumptions about families with 1.5 children or whatever; In reality, in San Francisco at least, I think only about 30% of the population has that sort of household format. There are all these other family constellations that are so different, yet our housing policies don’t acknowledge this. I think there should be a larger effort to expand family definitions through planning, and that architects and planners have to help make those larger adjustments. That’s what makes coming to Taubman so exciting. Between the planning program, and the Masters program in urban design, it really seems like a place where we can scale up our thinking about what the domestic commons should be.

Top photo collage featuring Antje Steinmuller courtesy of University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story reported Antje Steinmuller as the new dean. She is the new chair of architecture. It also said that Sharon Haar taught at the University of Chicago, but she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It also said that California College of the Arts is in Berkeley, but it is in San Francisco.