Alejandro Aravena's open-source plans for low-cost yet upgradable housing | Hacker News Reader

Alejandro Aravena's open-source plans for low-cost yet upgradable housing

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39 pointssaeranv19 comments

The article does not mention the cost of these houses which would seem to be the major point of information.

I think these developments can market themselves a lot better if they drop the terms "low income"/ "low cost"/"social housing" and adopted something like "young people homes" or "starter homes".

> The article does not mention the cost of these houses which would seem to be the major point of information.

I don't know if it's possible to provide an accurate number. Although it's possible to specify material costs, the cost of construction work is mainly driven by labor cost and the organizational capabilities of each contractor. Mexico's government could provide the info on their own contracts, but that wouldn't be very representative of what they could cost in, say, the US, where wages are far higher.

> I think these developments can market themselves a lot better if they drop the terms "low income"/ "low cost"/"social housing" and adopted something like "young people homes" or "starter homes".

These projects are mainly driven by the need to cut costs right down to the bone, even if this means that the housing projects are, say, far from luxurious.

The main reason is that this sort of project is targeted at local and central governments who feel the need to spend a part of their budget in social housing projects, whose main goal is a mix of improving people's housing, eliminate shanty towns, serve as the first stage of an urban renewal project, and even plain old populist propaganda to get them reelected.

Therefore, the target market is a set of organizations with deep pockets whose decision is mainly political and is driven by cost-benefit analyses, but ultimately aren't the ones who will actually use the end-result.

Therefore, as cost is king, these social housing projects tend to be located in regions whose real estate value is very low, mainly due their sub-par location. As the people who will end up living in these housing projects, due to their low income, essentially don't have any better alternatives than living in a substandard house in a sub-par location (because, given an alternative, they would live elsewhere) then that's exactly the sort of people who will end up living in these homes.

Meh. The big component of cost is land, not structure. And where structures are expensive it's usually due to regulations.

But any incremental cost reduction helps, so good for this guy.

this seems to create very homogenous neighborhoods. it would be nice if these styles were mixed up a bit. otherwise this would create very depressing environments.

this also seems like it wouldn't work inside the US. the main barrier to housing affordability here is zoning laws that prevent density and enough housing units from being built.

that said, i think with some modifications (ie create more variation) this is a good way for countries to be proactive about preventing slums.

Look to the Levittown experience for how variation is a naturally emergent property in the right setting; identical houses stamped out assembly-line fashion, yet after a decade they were already adapted to the point it was becoming difficult to discern houses on the same block started out identical to each other. The key was a design that was very open to owner adaptation.

Housing affordability is complex issue. While there are local factors like zoning as you mentioned, artificial distortions in the open market for land in the US (and much of the rest of the world) contribute a plurality of the effects causing the stratospheric cost of land wherever well-paying jobs can be found.

For every Levittown there are also hundreds of neighborhoods that never got any better after they were built. I would argue that Levittown can't be disentangled from the economic period in the United States - and it reflected the improving economic position of the working class. That ended in the 1970's for the United States (the GDP kept rising but it has gone to the rich. And home ownership is the same percent right now as it was in the mid-1970's.)

Going out on a limb, I think yourapostasy pointed to Levittown not to attempt to explain the entire economics of housing for the U.S.A. during the 70's (because hey, if we're taking the issue to that level we have to talk globally about inflation, oil, etc), but rather they were simply suggesting that, given the (in yourapostasy's ,i think correct and understated, words) "complex" issues surrounding affordable housing, Levittown is a helpful example in as far as providing a cookie cutter foundation which lends itself to indiviualisation over the long term, which is actually a more complex concept (much like building mountains or clouds out of simpler fractal shapes) than it first seems.

On point. The complexity of the overall land affordability issue isn't amenable to deconstructing in this forum's format, but yes, individualization is cheaper to accrete over time than build in from the start (especially if the labor input costs to generate the "individual differences" in the initial designs and operational implementations is driven by land costs themselves).

I agree that variation can emerge, but still wonder if it can be built in from the start. Do we really want to wait decades for our neighborhoods to gain individuality? Will Levittown ever reach the richness of some of the most beautiful cities?

What other artificial distortions are you thinking of?

Variation can be built in from the start as long as you are willing to pay for it. It is cheaper at the initial design and implementation stages to stamp out identical units that are openly adaptable. The architectural community's exploration into design patterns that filtered over to our community's GoF looked into a lot of these and related issues. The richness achieved over time was arguably very beautiful, as long as you placed a premium upon deep-rooted community identities built out of decades of individual adaptations, emerging like a coral reef.

A full discourse on HN isn't really the right format and forum to discuss land and socioeconomic policy, unless in the context of programmable shelter construction or similar. So I'll offer a tip of the iceberg thumbnail sketch. Land as an asset is given special privileges that other assets do not enjoy, and tightly coupled with that is debt (leverage for land) and capital are treated with special privileges that also are rarely found in other asset classes. These privileges are often enrobed and justified "for encouraging economic growth and development", but while that was true at inception, reflexivity has rendered those rationales moot today.

Personally, I've studied enough to realize I don't have the power to materially change any of this, and instead I focus upon what I can change in my individual sphere of influence. For my personal setting, that means focusing upon modular, incremental improvements in opex and deliberately eschewing conventional norms of how to allocate capex. A concrete example is eventually spending more on foamed glass insulation over time as the original shell itself, with the realization that easily-maintainable 70+ R-value insulation over >100 years between replacements will pay for itself on opex savings alone. A tangentially-related concept is reducing the economic churn in your and your family's lives as a means towards the cost avoidance of the associated economic rents extracted from the churn.

Ah, the key point of his design is exactly the opposite -- the architecture creates a scaffolding for user-modified housing, so that the neighborhood appears heterogeneous after some time.

The article does a bad job of showcasing only photographs of the projects right after they're built.

See the before/after pics in this article: http://www.arcspace.com/features/elemental/quinta-monroy/

This is a good point and I agree that the adaptability component is very effective. But don't you think that at the block to fabric scale (1 ha to 30 ha) the rigidity in vertical density is creating the inefficiencies I listed below?

I totally agree about the lack of vertical density, but I think in this case Chile and Mexico's tendency for earthquakes might have a lot to do with it.

Plus, it looks like the regions in which the projects are sited are not dense cities, but have similar low-rise 2~3-story buildings.

I guess adequate earthquake resistance with deeper foundations and specialized core would be more expensive. However building vertical should be cheaper per unit than a horizontal equivalent. I think the trade-off could optimized...

I think the homogeneity is a big problem. It does not take advantage of the local site to optimise for transit accessibility (through greater vertical density at transit nodes), energy efficiency (optimising for passive energy use through building geometry) and liveability (integration of mixed-use commercial functions for example). The design of these communities is a really cheap but effective way to upgrade the communities along these objectives and it's constrained here by the rigidity of using one housing type.

> the main barrier to housing affordability here is zoning laws that prevent density and enough housing units from being built

Exactly. For many desirable cities, the land is the lion's share of the property cost, not the house.

This reminds me of the low income housing projects set up post-war in New York but less dense. Generally they're a bit of a blight. Might these become blights as well?

generally,,, idk. i lived in Stuyvesant Town for a time, in Manhattan. it, was not blighted. it was effin amazing and i miss the living there, a lot. a lot, alot. if you didn't earn 150k+ in the city, it was pretty much the best thing going. new york city's post-war housing was not "low income", it was affordable housing. it was meant for working class folks. blight doesn't happen because something was initially meant for use by "low income" folks. blight happens because of neglect or stagnation. the term blight itself: "a plant disease, especially one caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smuts." so to stigmatize "low income" as being "blight" prone is to so badly conflate the issues involved as to verge on ignorance.

This should be Open Sourced. And adaptable for different site conditions.

Otherwise, it's just theoretical.

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