Truly cheap yet good housing is hard to find. Here is a group who thinks they found an answer though the construction may be the least of their issues:
For over a decade, architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University’s design-build program in a tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a nearly impossible problem. How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want–while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it?
In January, after years of building prototypes, the team finished their first pilot project in the real world. Partnering with a commercial developer outside Atlanta, in a tiny community called Serenbe, they built two one-bedroom houses, with materials that cost just $14,000 each.
The goal: To figure out how to bring the ultra-low-cost homes, called the 20K Home, to the broader market. “We’re in a kind of experimental stage of the program, where we’re really trying to find out the best practice of getting this house out into the public’s hands,” says Rusty Smith, associate director of Rural Studio. “Really this first field test was to find out all the things that we didn’t know, and to find out all of the kind of wrong assumptions that we had made, and really find out how we had screwed up, honestly.”…
In Serenbe, their first problem was a zoning issue: The houses were too small. (It’s a common problem for anyone trying to build a tiny home.) But they also realized there were numerous other issues, from dealing with insurance, to the bank. In the pilot project, the homes will be owned by the community and shared with artists as part of a residency program. But in a typical case, when someone is buying the house on a limited income and can’t afford the $20,000, banks won’t finance a mortgage for such a small amount of money.
It is worthwhile to consider that the actual construction is not the issue. Rather, how many communities and institutions really want to have cheap housing nearby? This is a common problem with creating cheaper housing: it is often within communities that are already cheaper, leading to issues like a lack of property value appreciation, a concentration of lower income residents, limited local tax revenues, and a stigma for the community.
The real trick with cheaper housing, then, is to be able to intersperse it among more expensive housing. We know this is especially helpful for young kids. (Thinking of the larger picture, this is why school integration wouldn’t go far enough – you don’t just want to bus students to go to school together but you want a range of incomes and groups to live near each other.) Again, who is really open to this?
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