ABSTRACT
The quasi-permanent nature of housing is a reproach to anyone who has ever allowed poorly designed, cheaply built housing to be constructed with the excuse that it will only have a useful life of 10, 20, or 30 years. While design matters for all buildings, whether for rich or poor, residential or commercial, it has an added significance when it comes to affordable housing. Affordable housing, by its nature, is housing for people who have fewer resources and fewer options outside the home than more affluent families. The perception in the American psyche of public housing—and by extension all housing for lower income families—was crystallized by the highly publicized demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis in the 1970s. Families who were able to move and the occupancy rate of the project swiftly declined to the point where more than half of the apartments were vacant.
