Homing In on Small : Architecture: Two partners have created a $36,000-house that can expand according to a buyer’s needs and income. The word to remember is <i> basic.</i>
Picture a house that costs all of $36,000 to build and a tar-paper shack is apt to spring to mind, or maybe a cornball geodesic dome that would stand out unpleasantly in even the most forgiving landscape.
Acceptable new housing today simply has to be expensive, the conventional wisdom has it, because surging land prices and interest rates are jacking up costs to nightmare levels. An architect can do little to cut the price of a house today, short of designing tepees or cinder block barracks.
That was the argument architects Witold Rybczynski and Avi Friedman kept hearing as they considered the problem of unaffordable housing in Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city. They were finally so put off by adages about the powerlessness of architects that they set about to disprove the going thesis.
Today, the two run the Affordable Homes Program at McGill University’s School of Architecture, where they have designed a series of low-cost houses, variations on a single theme they call the Grow Home.
A model Grow Home has been put up on the McGill campus this summer. Thousands of Montrealers have come to take a look, curious to see how Rybczynski and Friedman managed to pare the building cost to just $36,000.
(The estimated selling cost, in Montreal, is $62,000. The numbers in America could be lower or higher, depending on local land prices and construction costs.)
The Grow Home makes an interesting proposition for Los Angeles, a city where more than two-thirds of the families setting up households each year are headed by a single parent, where an estimated 150,000 families pay out more than half of their income in rent, and where, for the first time in 50 years, the proportion of home-renters is growing in proportion to the number of home-owners.
“The housing crisis in Los Angeles is a ponderous, horrible situation where you’ve got 90,000 families doubled and tripled up, and 150,000 families horribly rent-burdened,” says Gary Squier, a one-time Los Angeles city housing coordinator who is now a Santa Monica consultant on housing and public policy.
But Los Angeles is also a city where, perhaps as no place else, development of low-cost housing is blocked by housing codes and entrenched ideas about what a dwelling is. “Resistance to innovative housing types is enormous,” Squier says.
In Montreal, Friedman and Rybczynski accomplished their cost-cutting feat by designing around the assumption that people change as they age--and that those who want to own housing shouldn’t be expected to finance such luxuries as balconies, dormer windows, parquet floors and even closets over the life of a 20-year mortgage.
The Grow Home starts out well-built but simple, and as people need more features--and as they build up the cash to pay for them--they can buy them without incurring financing costs.
“It is an illusion that a closet is a small extra expense,” says Rybczynski, citing the feature most noticeably absent from the Grow House.
In Europe, he says, people routinely resort to armoires and don’t expect to find closets in every room. But Americans want built-in closets, he says, even though the cost of building them is higher than the cost of building a plain wall. “You are going to be carrying (the cost of) each closet for 20 years,” he warns, “which is important to think of in a time of high interest rates.”
Following this strip-it-down ethic wherever they could, Rybczynski and Friedman designed a sample Grow Home that forgoes not only closets but:
* Ceramic tile (bathroom surfaces are vinyl)
* Dividing walls upstairs (the second floor is simply one big room)
* Window shutters
* A dressing table or mirror in the downstairs bathroom.
* And any bathroom at all upstairs.
An even simpler version of the Grow Home--no balcony, no carpet upstairs, no attached back patio--could have been built on the lawn at McGill for a mere $31,000, the architects say, while a deluxe model with a basement and garage could have been done for about $49,000.
The architects also built small.
Size, they say, is the single most important factor in the cost of building a house. Yet American concepts of how big a residence must be are all out of whack with American housing history and with late-20th-Century demographics.
A generation ago, Rybczynski points out, the average family had 4.2 people. If that family sought shelter in one of the mass-produced split levels of Levittown, they made do with just 800 to 1,000 square feet.
Today, he says, the average family numbers 2.3 people, and if they inhabit this year’s average single-family house, it knocks around in 1,850 square feet of space.
Knowing that families are getting smaller and houses are getting bigger, Rybczynski, 47, and Friedman, 38, figured they could shrink the space of the Grow Home and still let today’s occupant come out ahead of his parents.
They built the McGill model just 14 feet wide--the width of a modern-day mobile home, although Rybczynski detests the analogy, preferring instead to compare it to the charmingly narrow antique row houses of Georgetown or Philadelphia’s Society Hill. The Grow House, meant to be built in groupings as townhouses or terraces, has 1,000 square feet of space inside, with a larger-than-average kitchen, a commodious master bedroom, but a rather confined living room in the back.
The architects say they knew where to scrimp. Rybczynski is the author of, among other books, the well-reviewed “Home,” a readable, thoughtful treatise on the meaning of domestic comfort.
Meanwhile, Friedman, who once worked as a developer’s researcher, went house to house to ask people what they wanted in shelter.
Friedman says that since the interviewees were under no obligation to buy houses from his developer-employer, they were straight with him. Instead of running on about sweeping vestibules and marble fireplaces, he says, they talked realistically about what they liked to do when they got up in the morning, or what “dinner” meant to them.
“It made me understand how people live and use spaces,” he says of his door-to-door work.
He put that understanding into practice in the plan of the Grow Home.
So how do the Montrealers who have toured the Grow Home rate it? Friedman says they fall into two distinct groups. The first are those who live in apartments, who dream about owning a place of their own but are frozen out of the market. They know from experience that they can live comfortably in 1,000 square feet, and when they walk through the Grow Home, they have no trouble picturing themselves setting up house in it. The thought that they could own the space for the same price they now pay in rent seems to set their imaginations on fire, says Friedman: They start talking about the changes they would make if the Grow Home were theirs to change.
“When I hear this, I realize that we have succeeded,” says Friedman. “This is the test of a house: Whether this space can accommodate the changes in our lives.”
The second group of visitors, though, is made up of Canadians who already own houses, who have begun to trade up and up and who can no longer conceive of living in 1,000 square feet, with no closets.
“It’s very clear-cut: Those who own homes say, ‘I cannot see myself living in something like this,’ ” says Friedman, who likes to slip into the Grow Home model and eavesdrop on viewers’ remarks.
Rybczynski theorizes that rapid advances in the consumer-electronics industry have tricked people into thinking “progress” means a world of possessions inexorably better and cheaper. If Everyman can now buy a fax, a home photocopier and a video camera, people wonder, then why can’t he buy his own house?
“When people hear about a $40,000 house, they assume that this house will have everything that a regular house would have, and that for some magic reason, it’s cheaper,” Rybczynski says with a smile. “They feel slightly cheated (when they see the modest Grow Home). People say, ‘Oh, it’s not really cheaper. It’s less.’
“I think,” he continues, “that what we’re trying to do is difficult and very un-American--which is to make people go backwards, and consume less rather than more.”
And that’s the bedrock problem for Los Angeles, a city that is the soul of sprawl, growth and consumption.
City housing codes come down on the side of the status quo. Los Angeles lots now must be at least 50 feet wide--wide enough for 3 1/2 Grow Homes. In some suburbs, the minimum lot width is even greater.
Some community codes set a minimum number of bedrooms or bathrooms per unit or require certain types of chimneys and siding.
And then there is the requirement, all across Los Angeles, that developers work in two parking spaces, if not an actual covered garage, per house. A single car could just barely squeeze in on the street in front of a 14-foot Grow Home.
“Townhouses are not common in Southern California,” says Andy Raubeson, executive director of Los Angeles’s acclaimed SRO Housing Corp., which preserves single-room apartment hotels for the poor. “Southern California is a funny market. Condominiums downtown here don’t sell, whereas if you put the same kind of condominiums in downtown New York, they would be snapped up at twice the price. It’s an attitude. People here, when they buy, want to buy a standard house with a lot.”
Rybczynski, ever optimistic, is betting that as more and more young people tire of commuting to affordable suburbs or renting year after year, a market for the Grow Home will take shape.
Earlier this summer, a judge in New Jersey struck down a municipal zoning code that had forced developers to build houses on vast plots of land. In reaching his decision, the judge looked at the average income of the target area of the litigation and noted that almost no locals could afford to buy the low-density housing the challenged ordinance called for.
And in Montreal, where, as in Los Angeles, the zoning code forbids 14-foot lots, a local newspaper sent a reporter to critique the Grow Home. Instead of an architectural review, he filed an expose of regulations that blocked developers from building--and young people from buying--a perfectly serviceable house.
Embarrassed Montreal officials came to check out the Grow Home for themselves.
They must have liked what they saw, Rybczynski says, because now the city has set about rewriting its codes, and developers are talking to him about building the Grow Home.