Affordable Housing Delivery Is More Than Bricks and Mortar (July 10, 2023)
Reflecting on a Housing Presentation by Michael Eliason with Michael Janz at the University of Alberta Quick Hits... June 29, 2023
Vlog Overview
This free parks and urban planning vlog is intended to share my 30+ years of parks practitioner experience married with my recently completed (2019) Phd exploring park and urban planning decision-making processes. For more information about my vlog, and why you should subscribe, please read the vlog entitled “The Use Case for Parks Are Like Icebergs Vlog.,” March 5, 2023.
Todays Ice Sculpture
Affordable Housing Is More Than Bricks and Mortar (July 10, 2023)
Mr Eliason of Larch Lab, Seattle Washington, is an architect and green building affordable housing advocate discussing the design and institutional setting for more affordable forms of housing. Mr. Eliason has extensive experience in the United States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk that moved me to put down some ideas. Kudos for Edmonton municipal Councillor Micheal Janz for bringing in this thoughtful speaker. He spoke at the Timms Centre on the University of Alberta Campus on June 29th, 2023.
The premise of his presentation was that while we have an affordable housing crisis or challenge, we also have equally significant existential threats in climate change and social isolation in our current forms of urban design and infrastructure. As such affordable housing is more than a land use, or a building. It exists within a broader context of liveable and equitable cities.
I would take the Eliason concept one step further. We need to think more expansively than social isolation - we need to think about human mental health/illness, physical health, and the collective health of the community. These outcomes are partially addressed by Eliason in both buildings and courtyards, but should be augmented to provide a community development opportunity.
Building Design
I am not a building architect but his building design perspectives are intriguing. I apologize in advance if I missed some of the nuances of his excellent presentation. Optimal building height appears to be 6-7 story multi-family residential development. He advocated three building physical designs shown below, each of which would mean residents naturally intersect with one another to reduce social isolation. Figures 1-3 below show how buildings may be designed to enable passive or unintended engagement with other residents.
Figure 1: Point Access Block
Figure 2: Double Loaded Corridor
Figure 3: Single Loaded Corridor
Equally important (to me) was the buildings themselves would be narrow in ways that create centralized courtyards, where residents would be able to gather and connect with their neighbours, once again reducing social isolation. This means reduced facility footprint and more green space on site.
Mr Eliason also strongly advocated for building designs that were energy efficient to reduce their ecological footprint. Inclusion of this at the end of his design ideas described here does not suggest a reduced priority or importance.
The picture below, not from the speakers notes, is my interpretation of what he was suggesting, from Berlin Germany.
Figure 4: Internalized Outdoor Private Gathering Places
Despite greater intervention by governments in Europe to mix housing types, economic interests have continued to have success in raising rents and land values through various legal but creative means (i.e., evict tenants paying lower rents for upgrades to allow rents to increase). A large scale protest has occurred in Berlin that sought to expropriate housing from large multi-national economic interests (owning 3000 or more units), to be then held by the local government for public housing. Below is a poster used to advocate the right to housing.
Operationalizing the Eliason Vision
In the parks world in Edmonton, over time we had developed roles and responsibilities in parks service delivery that included developers, administrators, elected officials, community NGO’s and private businesses. Community was central and integral to the on-going delivery of municipal schools, parks and recreation services. I have previously written about this in this vlog series. In short, we know who is doing what, when, where and how park services are delivered.
I do not presume to know how best to deliver housing and affordable housing. However, it is more than creating a residential land use in a zoning bylaw and building a bricks and mortar 6-7 story building and expediting development approvals. The administration is working passionately and deliberately to create that operational plan. Based on media reports and the city web site, this is a complex issue that requires all three levels of government, multiple state and non-state actors. The implementation is under construction, and not quite delivering all on all cylinders.
Institutional Setting
Institutions have many layers and overlapping social actors, not limited to government agencies. Institutions are groups of like interested state and non-state social actors connecting to achieve a shared outcome. There are multiple institutions operating concurrently. In this case, the U of A speaker is advocating for three different groups of social institutional actors - housing, ecology and social actors to combine and connect to achieve better outcomes that serve all three needs both on the micro and macro levels.
In Edmonton and elsewhere, since the 80s economic institutions and associated outcomes increasingly privileged over social and ecological interests. In that time period, elected officials and administrators have increasingly aligned themselves with economic interests, particularly since the early 2000s, and have been increasingly submissive if not facilitative to economic development over community interests. Edmonton is not willing to mandate economic interests to support the affordable housing like that in Europe to any significant extent as part of their shared community responsibility. This is a class of unequal institutions.
Current City Approaches
City Plan has created, amongst other things, a policy framework to enable a greater diversity of housing types including affordable housing. Landowners can bring forward applications to provide garage suites, basement suites, second storys, etc. The process requires a site specific zoning bylaw amendment (i.e., micro application) that allows for an understanding of how the proposed change impacts local residents. A bylaw amendment process requires community notice and a public hearing to give community members a level of agency to learn about, understand and share their views and perspectives, both positive and negative. Once approved, development and building permits are required.
Amendments to bylaws occur at every municipal council meeting. Where existing zoning categories do not properly capture the proposed development, the landowner/developer can request a direct control district that specifically outlines the parameters of approval. Once again, these happen quite often, and most often used by developers. This process, that takes time, affords the community a “lived experience” voice specific to the local (micro) setting. The amendment process also costs money that is the responsibility of landowners, passed on to the purchaser of the new development. Recent research suggests that the current bylaw does not facilitate a broad diversity of housing types, nor any sense of sustainable development. It has privileged single family housing - a trend for decades favoured and supported by planning administrators, elected officials and developers. (Did somebody poop the bed?)
Longer term, the city is currently undertaking a comprehensive review of its zoning bylaw for the first time in approximately 60 years, although incremental changes occurred regularly. My preliminary read, amongst other things, the city seeks to expedite residential development densities for rationale reasons, but do so by limiting community engagement. This will be the subject of a future vlog.
Conclusions
Five elements of the Eliason presentation resonated with this old parks planner, and a few riffs of my own off his ideas. First, policy plans like City Plan toss around the term sustainable development in the housing context, but the term itself is malleable to any specific desired outcome at the macro level - this time affordable housing. The rubber hits the road at the micro level, in site and implementation strategies, where competing high level policies are in play and need the expertise of the community to vet changes.
Second, Eliasons designs showed centralized accessible green space for high density residential neighbourhood is an integral part of his concepts in terms of supporting and integrated with positive ecological and social outcomes. Connecting with diverse populations in gathering spaces is integral to his concepts, and recognizes the importance of gathering spaces themselves. To that end, I would suggest Eliasons broader conceptualization of housing be expanded to connect with public spaces both systematically and programmatically.
Third, economic institutions left to their own devices are not pre-disposed to create affordable housing. Rising land values, unit values and rents are an implied goal and outcome fundamentally written into legislation and policy. This remains true in Edmonton. Berlin is a setting where large private economic interests are scaling up rents and land values, making them unaffordable. Vancouver and Toronto have high density and high property prices and rents. City Plan nor a Zoning Bylaw redux will ensure housing is affordable, but should be counted on to share the burden.
Fourth, following the point above, governments have a role to intervene in the market and mandate with policies, practices and standards to effect outcomes that provides a broad mix of co-located market and non-market housing for a diverse population base that simultaneously support social, ecological and health and wellness outcomes.
Fifth, institutional theory tells me that movements can form to interdict actions of economic institutions. An additional community based bottom line is necessary and a group of social actors working to that end.
Elected officials and administrators are faced with an impossible task of meeting multiple competing needs in a pluralistic society. I have experienced their pain. Today, I believe state social actors are well intentioned but risk being too embedded in economic institutions to see broader community interests and needs.
Dr. Priebe, very much enjoyed your article "Affordable Housing is More than Bricks and Mortar," and recently had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Michael Eliason of Larch Labs on Point Access Block development. It is my understanding that currently this type of development is prohibited in North America due to Fire Safety Code. Canada's National Research Council is currently reviewing and revising the National Building Code this year with a new addition coming in 2024. What can be done to address deficiencies to meet Code requirements so this type of development is possible. Smarter Infill is a new group in Edmonton that is advocating for increased density that achieves broader sustainable development goals including ensuring truly affordable housing that also supports climate resilience in communities by providing sufficient Green Asset Area for green infrastructure that provides environmental benefits to ensure livability . This would also ensure sufficient outdoor amenity area is provided for safe outdoor gathering, recreation and connection. Freiberg Green City by Wolfgang Frey outlines approaches to achieve these sustainable urban development outcomes.