Carroll Fife, head of the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), hit a major turning point last fall. A homeless mother who’d sought help from her organization had just attempted suicide, while up to a quarter of her staff were themselves facing homelessness. For Fife, the complete erosion of affordable housing in the Bay Area, and the despair that came with it, demanded a new, bolder course of action.

“I said, Look, I don’t have any money. I don’t have friends who own apartment buildings or houses. I really don’t have anything to give other than my networks and my ability to organize,” Fife recalled. “So we took a house that was speculator-owned and lying vacant in the neighborhood for years.”

That November, four homeless mothers, including two who worked at ACCE with Fife, moved into 2928 Magnolia Street in West Oakland and—in plain view of neighbors—sought to prove that they could revive a decrepit house, vandalized and ignored for years, and turn it into a family home. They started sweeping and making repairs and arranged for the plumbing and roofing to be fixed.

It wasn’t long before law enforcement knocked on their door, demanding that they vacate. But the mothers, under the banner of their new collective movement, Moms 4 Housing, were steadfast. The act of civil disobedience made headlines, mothers around the world wrote in support, and even after death threats and break-ins, they stood their ground. Affordable housing in America became international news. Moms 4 Housing’s attorneys would spend the next couple of months challenging the eviction notice, arguing for housing as a human right.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the United States already had a shortage of seven million rental units for households with extremely low incomes as of March 2019. Now, as upward of 40 million people face the risk of eviction because of joblessness caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing recession, finding new solutions to creating affordable housing is key to abating an imminent national housing crisis decades in the making.

Around the country, groups are taking up the challenge. Their approaches are varied, addressing the unique conditions, jurisdictions, geographies, and categories of people in need. But they all call for letting go of outdated notions about what affordable housing is—and whom it serves.

Affordable housing in America has its roots in Depression-era federal reforms established after rising public awareness of the living conditions of the urban poor. But by the 1980s, federal housing projects had become notorious for segregating Black and white residents and for “warehousing” the poor in mismanaged, low-quality structures that concentrated poverty in the periphery of cities— leading to the stigma that surrounds the concept of public housing today.

Reforms to that system, for better or worse, created the modern affordable housing industry, where developers, financiers, and designers work in tandem to max out tax credits and subsidies to provide the national market with a limited and inadequate supply of housing for vulnerable populations and those facing homelessness.

Most of these projects involve complex financial arrangements, clever interpretations of code, and the accumulation of cost-saving measures. Take Pancratia Hall Lofts in Denver, under development by Hartman Ely Investments, a two-person company made up of James Hartman and Susan Ely, both of whom previously worked at design firms. Set to be completed next year, it involves the conversion of a 1930 dormitory building at the now closed Loretto Heights campus in the southwestern part of the city into 72 units of income-restricted rental housing.

The financing is acrobatic: The $25 million project is funded by a $9.3 million investment for federal historic preservation and low-income housing tax credits from partner PNC Real Estate, $1 million from state historic preservation tax credits, a $7.8 million federally backed loan from the Colorado Housing Finance Authority, a $3.3 million City of Denver housing loan, approximately $1.4 million in loans from other state authorities, and $1.43 million in financing from the property seller. This does not include millions in “bridge financing” from additional partners that make the project possible in initial stages. The development team, composed of Hartman Ely and partner Proximity Green, is deferring roughly $555,000 in fees.

The design for Hartman Ely’s renovation is far from the cheaply finished spaces we typically imagine when we think of affordable housing. “Made of concrete with terrazzo floors and wood ceilings, the building is perfect to convert into lofts with high ceilings and big windows,” Hartman says. “You can’t find that in new affordable buildings, which tend to be really cookie-cutter.”

Breaking Ground, a nonprofit providing transitional and permanent supportive housing primarily in New York City, has worked with a similar model for years. Operating as a developer, it started out by converting two disused hotels in Manhattan into affordable housing units with wraparound services for adults experiencing or at risk of homelessness, whether because of low income or other conditions, such as HIV/AIDS or mental illness.

“Our buildings do not look like institutions—they are not scary,” says Brenda Rosen, president and CEO at Breaking Ground. “If you’re in New York, walking by one, you’d have no idea that we have a vulnerable population living inside.” Recent projects include Boston Road, a 154-unit building in the Bronx for formerly homeless single adults by Alexander Gorlin Architects that has a stronger design than many market-rate developments.

Former New York City planning commissioner Vishaan Chakrabarti, now founder and principal at the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), is working on one of the most ambitious affordable housing projects in the country: a master plan for Sunnyside Yard in western Queens, a 180-acre redevelopment of a major regional rail hub that would take advantage of tax breaks and other subsidies to provide the city with 12,000 additional housing units for low-income families and individuals.

But for Chakrabarti, the pandemic and its economic fallout have made it time to revisit old models as well.

“You still have a housing crisis, but it’s driven by a very different set of dynamics that has to do with an upturn in the homeless population and massive unemployment,” says Chakrabarti. “That’s why you need to resuscitate the public housing conversation. Recovery is going to require direct infusions of cash, ideally by the federal government, in what will be deficit spending in order to build more homes and to get the country back up on its feet, which is how we recovered from the Great Depression.”

The scope of those affected by rising costs has expanded beyond the most vulnerable as many urban areas have become more expensive. The professional middle class has also been squeezed out of the cities where they live and work.

For Jonathan Tate, architect and principal at the Office of Jonathan Tate (OJT) in New Orleans, affordable housing is a personal problem. His studio’s Saint Thomas/Ninth project was designed as a speculative middle-market housing development to accommodate artists and creative professionals who could no longer afford to live in the historic Irish Channel neighborhood. Saint Thomas/Ninth homes sold for approximately half the average for the neighborhood.

The development is part of the Starter Home program, a project by OJT and private partners aimed at developing dense, middle-market family homes in historic neighborhoods by purchasing cheap land deemed too complex or unprofitable by developers with standard design playbooks. The office has now completed 17 single-family homes across five development sites using this model—including Tate’s own home.

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“A few years ago, my wife and I were going crazy looking for a house we could afford in a neighborhood we wanted to live in,” he says. “We had just had two children and managed to eke out enough money to buy an old house to renovate, only to see our equity go bonkers because of a bust in the local market.” One day, while walking through the construction site of Saint Thomas/Ninth, Tate decided to sell his house and buy a corner unit there instead. He moved in with his family in January 2018.

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Atticus LeBlanc, an investor and housing advocate in Atlanta, is also finding opportunities in underutilized places. In 2017 he founded PadSplit, an online marketplace that matches prospective tenants with owners renting individual rooms at affordable week-by-week rates.

“The people we have been able to house are workers that cities across the country want to have—a grad student, a yoga instructor, a security guard, a bus driver.”
—Atticus LeBlanc, Founder, PadSplit

PadSplit’s philosophy is pragmatic: It presents a profit incentive for landlords to supply affordable units by leveraging properties with an abundance of bedrooms. “You have a tipping point where it is actually more profitable to rent by the room than it is to rent the entire property in and of itself,” says LeBlanc. But PadSplit goes further, hooking up landlords with supportive services for tenants who need them. “We partner with a staffing agency, with a medical provider,” LeBlanc says. “We find that telemedicine is extremely cost-efficient.”

LeBlanc also thinks it’s important that affordable housing be spread out through communities, especially in urban areas. “I often describe the low-income workforce as an invisible population—you see them but you don’t really see them, you don’t realize how long their commute is, you don’t realize that maybe the security officer is living in a car,” he says. “The more you can separate people from a predetermined environment and give them the ability to choose where they want to live, the more likely you are to see them as people.”

But as the Moms 4 Housing movement demonstrated last fall in Oakland, for this “invisible” population, sometimes the problem of housing insecurity can’t wait for master plans, subsidized housing, or market-based tech solutions.

On January 14, the occupation of 2928 Magnolia Street came to an end when armed deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department forcibly evicted the four mothers, arresting one for mis-demeanor charges of resisting and obstructing the eviction. The charges were dropped a month later.

After months of negotiations (eventually helped along by Mayor Libby Schaaf and Governor Gavin Newsom), the corporate owner sold the house in mid-October to the Oakland Community Land Trust, which stewards community-owned property to ensure permanent affordability. Moms 4 Housing plans to turn it into transitional housing for homeless mothers and their children, and eventually into a training center where residents can be employed to renovate other vacant homes.

Carroll Fife—who was just elected to Oakland’s city council in the November election—is hopeful that the episode will continue to inspire other movements and encourage grassroots organizing in cities around the world.

“Housing is something that people need to live and to thrive, like water and air.”
—Carroll Fife, activist and Oakland city council member

The urgent reclamation of an abandoned house in Oakland bypassed murky bureaucracies and housing markets, subsidies, and tax credits. It made the simple human need for shelter—in this case, for four mothers and their children—explicit and impossible to ignore.

When the availability of affordable housing limits where people can live and work in cities, when it pushes segments of the population to the periphery, toward alienation and despair, it disturbs the entire urban ecology. The prosperity of cities is tied to the stability and social mobility they can offer their inhabitants, especially vulnerable populations and essential workers.

To create affordable housing in abandoned homes, hotels, and college dorms; to build them from scratch in irregular lots in historic neighborhoods; to create digital marketplaces to simplify access; or even to discuss federally funded public housing again—these are all valid and necessary solutions to the challenges we face today.

They highlight the richness of resources at our disposal and the bravery of those imagining radical solutions to the affordability crisis in America, and hopefully they will ignite the kind of thinking needed in the months to come. Most important, in order to gather the public and private support necessary to redirect resources toward the cause, we must first recognize that affordable housing is everybody’s problem.

Appears In

How to Build an Affordable America