You can watch the twenty-eighth Parlour LAB here!
In this seminar we turn our attention to affordable housing: What is it? How do we get more of it? How do we make sure it is designed well?
In addition to the statutory definitions of affordable housing (for eligible low to moderate income households paying no more than 30% of their income on rent), Michael and Catherine define affordable housing as designed to meet household needs, geographically located near transport and services (which, in turn, has a spatial implication of a more-often urban housing typology such as row houses or apartments), more robust and durable design briefs to minimise maintenance and running costs, compact, comfortable, not luxurious (without optional extras such as pools and cinemas), and designed to reduce energy costs to benefit users. They also discussed the need to understand that there is a spectrum both of housing need and housing type, and that these should not be conflated.
Key takeaways for built environment professionals were:
Design affordable housing to be flexible so that we can be more adventurous and innovative when it comes time to renovate in the future.
Advocate for more affordable housing by talking to and collaborating with people outside your own discipline, running seminars with the community, joining different organisations and contributing your expertise outside your industry, teaching and getting to young minds early.
Focus on how to deliver affordable housing - everyone knows we need affordable and social housing, so now we need to get into the detail of how we deliver it (what does it look like? who is it for? where is it? how can we create strong and effective policies, funding and delivery models to support it?).
Embed equitable development in policy by reframing deep-seated thinking about property rights and value uplift going only to private-land owners to capture more public value through all development.
Move towards more person-centric outcomes by thinking about housing as infrastructure, rather than a commodity. This also allows us to develop a more balanced housing system with both a strong speculative and non-speculative housing market to create balance.