What Affordable Housing Should Afford: Housing for Resilient Cities

AbstractWell-designed affordable housing involves more than the provision of safe, decent, and inexpensive shelter; it needs to be central to the resilience of cities. Framing the issue as a matter of "what affordable housing should afford" expands the agenda for housing designers to consider factors that extend beyond the physical boundaries of buildings and engage the social, economic, environmental, and political relationships that connect housing to cities. To maximize its capacity to support the resilience of cities, affordable housing should engage as many as possible of the following four criteria: (1) support the community social structure and economic livelihoods of residents, (2) reduce the vulnerability of residents to environmental risks and stresses, (3) enhance the personal security of residents in the face of violence or threats of displacement, and (4) empower communities through enhanced capacities to share in their own governance. We illustrate these principles with four examples from recent practice-two illustrating the struggle for everyday affordable housing (in San Francisco and in Iquique, Chile) and two describing the special circumstances that result in the aftermath of disaster (in New Orleans and in Banda Aceh, Indonesia). Taken together, these examples demonstrate what is at stake if we ask affordable housing design to serve the greater goal of city resilience.Introduction: Linking Affordable Housing to Resilient CitiesThe concepts affordable housing and resilient cities have each attained widespread use in recent years, but their very ubiquity has increasingly moved researchers and practitioners away from consensus about the meaning of either term. Mentions of affordable housing quickly trigger questions: Affordable for whom? Affordable for how long? What is affordable? Is paying 30 percent of income really an appropriate threshold for defining affordability for everyone, regardless of their income? Questions of politics, policy, and design also apply: Who should be responsible for providing affordable housing-the government, private sector, or nonprofit organizations? How does affordable housing remain affordable? Should affordable housing look the same as market-rate housing-except that residents receive subsidies-or should it be designed, sited, and built differently?The invocation of resilience raises similar questions about meaning, intent, and application and risks becoming at least as imprecise as "sustainability" has become. Resilience for whom? Against what? Resilience for how long and to what end? Does resilience connote the engineer's notion of bouncing back to equilibrium after a perturbation or does it reflect the ecologist's concern that ecosystem disruption creates dynamic change and may lead to a nonequilibrium outcome? Is resilience instead characterized by the capacity of management to return to business as usual, or rooted in the psychologist's assessment about individual recovery from trauma, or revealed by the homeland security professional's interest in the capacities of networks to resist disruption? It can be all these things and more.The concept of resilience is increasingly used to describe how well urban areas do or do not respond to crises. Prominent organizations, including international aid agencies and major philanthropic foundations, have popularized the idea of urban resilience and promoted the view that resilience is a condition that cities can aspire to reach.1 The notion of a resilient city, however, generates questions about who or what counts as part of the city-are whole cities resilient, or merely some parts, some places, some institutions, or some individuals? Given this ambiguity of terminology, the problem may appear to be compounded by proposing to engage affordable housing and resilient cities together. Instead, we argue, using each term to help focus and clarify the meaning of the other offers a way out of this dilemma. …