Feature
by Emily Landes
Picture an affordable housing complex and you are likely to conjure up visions of square, squat buildings with little color and even less green space. This is exactly the image that San Francisco architect David Baker has been trying to quash in his many years creating dynamic, well-designed affordable housing that meshes the varying needs of his buildings’ low-income occupants with the same aesthetic principles that Baker and his architecture firm, David Baker and Partners, bring to market-rate complexes and high-end hotels. Baker recently sat down for an exclusive interview with San Francisco Apartment Magazine in the glamorous courtyard of the newly completed Curran House, a 32-unit affordable housing development in the Tenderloin.
Q. One of the differences between affordable housing and market-rate housing is that affordable housing is commonly used by more people, more often. How do you account for that in your design?
A. When I’m designing the inside, I use high-quality stuff that won’t be destroyed. Your average market-rate apartment will have seventy units with 100 people. It’s a much lower density than in affordable housing. Take something small like recirculating-fan kitchen hoods, for example. If you take your average upwardly mobile San Franciscans, they’re going out to eat or they’re getting take-out. But take your average ethnic family from Ghana, and they’re cooking from morning until night. They really, really use things so we’ve really, really got to get that moisture out of there. There’s also a lot of noise control to worry about. If you get an apartment with five kids and they’ve got bicycles, tricycles and rollerskates, it would drive the people downstairs nuts. So you’ve got to build them [the buildings] really heavy, like a battleship, to make them quiet.
Q. How much do neighbors want to be involved in the planning process when affordable housing is coming to their neighborhood?
A. They do like to be involved, and when they aren’t they can be pretty aggressive. We did this project once where the neighbors went crazy over this light yellow color that we painted the building. They got their local councilmember to force us to repaint it beige. But the real reason they were screaming was because they hadn’t been consulted about the color. Then we did another project where the developer met with the people throughout the whole process and got them involved. We picked the color for that with them, and they picked bright red and a really modern building. Your average developer says, “You can’t do a modern building because people don’t like that.” But the neighbors liked the modern building because they were involved in the decision-making process, and they think it’s cool. And these were projects that were practically on the same site. So, it’s not a matter of different neighborhoods, it’s just a matter of paying attention.
Q. Why is there still a stigma attached to modern-looking affordable housing?
A. Affordable housing really got its start in the 1950s, and they were very inventive with architecture, but they weren’t listening at all. They were anti-“The City,” and you can see that in the Western Addition where they built stuff that really doesn’t fit in and then it was managed poorly. So, sometimes modern design gets blamed for the Housing Authority’s management. It’s really not the building’s fault. And then some of it wasn’t designed smartly. If this building was designed in the 1950s, they would’ve made this garden a parking garage, with a chain-link fence and a really small lobby. It would’ve been awful.
These things are done much more sensitively now, thinking about global concerns and residents’ concerns. The architects then were like, “I want to make this beautiful object that’s really cool.” And they weren’t talking to the users or the neighborhood at all. They weren’t thinking about pedestrians because pedestrians were considered old-fashioned. They weren’t thinking that if you design for a car, then you’re de facto not designing for people.
Q. Many units you’ve designed have minimal or no parking. Do you think the city’s parking problems are overemphasized?
A. I think it’s worse than overemphasized; people don’t understand the issue. People think that if more housing is built and doesn’t have parking, it will be harder for them to park on the street and thus harder for them to drive around. Well, parking on the street can be dealt with by charging for street parking; and when you do that, there’s more parking. The other issue is congestion, and putting a lot of parking in your project increases congestion. The cars that are in those garages come out and drive around, making it almost impossible to drive in San Francisco and contributing to the deterioration of MUNI’s service because the buses have all these cars in front of them and can’t get anywhere. So providing parking doesn’t help people with cars or on mass transit and does nothing for street parking because, like anything free, you can’t make enough of it. But the harder it is to store your car for free, the fewer cars people have.
Q. If you charge more for parking, doesn’t that become a problem for low-income people?
A. Sure. If you’re a low-income person who has a job that requires you to have a car, we could have a rule that says: you get a free parking space. But a car costs hundreds of dollars a month; and, if they don’t need it for a job, that [same] hundreds of dollars a month applied to living would allow them to have a much nicer space.
Q. But San Francisco is a large commuter city. Many people who live here don’t work here and do need their cars to commute.
A. I got rid of my car five years ago. There are some meetings and jobs that I can’t get to easily on transit, but there aren’t very many. Most people use cars because they’re convenient, not because they need them.
Q. Aside from parking, what other affordable housing myths would you like to dispel?
A. People still have this image of government-run affordable housing where it’s dangerous, and units are burned out and people are selling drugs. But nonprofit affordable housing developers are incredibly stable and incredibly well managed because they can’t afford to not be well managed. Then when they came to do the next project, somebody would go, “Look at their other property with mattresses out front and people selling crack.” They can’t have that. So they manage them better than the private sector, and they’re not sold to some crazy new developer who is overleveraged and causes them to get run down. I’m not trying to “dis” the private sector here, I’m just saying that the nonprofits have a bigger incentive than anyone to manage their buildings well. I can take you into projects that were built ten years ago, and they’re immaculate because every single one is a statement of how together they are and how the buildings are not a problem. The ones that do the best jobs get more projects.
Also, these buildings raise property values; they don’t lower them. They’re really good for the city as a whole because they’re so stable. They create an island of stability where you’ll get this fix-up effect for the surrounding buildings because other property owners will look at it and kind of get embarrassed about their own properties.
In Holland they started building affordable housing about 80 years before we did, and they’ve actually reached the point where they have too much affordable housing. So the idea that you can never solve the housing crisis is absolutely wrong. You just have to keep doing it for a long time, and you’ll eventually catch up. There have been a lot of units built in these affordable projects, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can pass one bond and be done. You have to keep at it and eventually you get to a balancing point between affordable and nonaffordable.
Q. What do you think of inclusionary housing requirements that allow you to build affordable units on a separate site from the market-rate units?
A. We’re doing a building where we were the beneficiaries of exportation. We got money that made this building possible. So as someone who’s benefited directly from it, I’m a little biased. But at the same time I think it is creepy to say, “Hunters Point really needs housing, so we’re going to build some over there but then have only rich people over here.” I think, socially, it’s debatable if that’s really wise.
Q. What are some design rules that are essential no matter what you’re designing?
A. I never build anything that I wouldn’t live in myself. The landscape architect for the Curran House was the same landscape architect that I used for the Hotel Healdsburg. She had $1.5 million there, she had a lot less money [at Curran House], but somebody came in here and said, “Wow, this is affordable housing? This looks like a South Beach hotel.” So, we really stretch the bar in every way and try to apply the highest level of design because we try to make wise decisions. That 5% extra that goes into making it really nice—over the long run, it’s good for the owners because people are much nicer. People tag less and there’s less vandalism in the buildings. If you patronize people and treat them like chumps, they get you back. But if you treat people like you value them and do the very best job for them, they move less, they like it better and they treat the unit better because they’re proud of it.
Q. Why do so many of your properties emphasize green space?
A. Plants are enormously important. We have a joke that it’s important to be Feng Shui compliant. Green space has a lot more importance in San Francisco than in, say, Pleasant Hill, where they have too much yard and we have none. I think we’ve been pretty successful in integrating gardens and opening up the space to create this California indoor-outdoor living.
Q. What are some of the other differences between working in San Francisco and working in the surrounding Bay Area?
A. If we go somewhere too suburban, we run into a cognitive dissonance problem. It’s like I’m from Mars and they’re from Venus. It’s best for us to avoid those situations, so we try to stay in more urban areas. We have very little space for new clients anyway, and we don’t want to grow the company because we have a very special, intense process and it isn’t easily expanded. We have 15 people, and we’re not going to hire any more. We’re kind of like a closed mutual fund. We’ve done so well that you can’t buy any more shares. And we really like working with the nonprofits because it’s very calm and they typically share our goals. I think it’s really great to make money, but you shouldn’t make that your only goal.
Q. Do you get more enjoyment out of working with nonprofits than market-rate developers?
A. It’s different. When you get to the high end, you sometimes get to spend more money on detailing. So it can be more enjoyable on a purely aesthetic level. I hate to say this, but the higher the income level, the ruder and nastier the people are. Not all of them, but there’s sort of a sense that “I spent a lot of money, so I’m going to treat you really badly,” whereas the affordable housing people are wildly happy and appreciative. There’s a huge difference between designing one huge, luxury condo or another, where it really doesn’t make much difference [to the people’s lives] and, for example, this security guard who lived in an SRO with her father, who is in a wheelchair, and bought a two-bedroom below-market unit and was able to start dating and even get married. Her life was totally made better by this unit, and I think [for low-income housing] that’s more common than not. It’s immensely rewarding.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the assistant editor of the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2006 by the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.