There simply aren’t enough affordable homes. As OECD reported last summer: ‘Even before the start of the pandemic, one in ten Europeans were spending more than 40 per cent of their income on housing.’ This problem, however, isn’t unique to Europe and is commonplace in most major cities. How is spatial design responding to meet soaring demand given the current market’s shortcomings? Architects and designers are employing creative approaches like adaptive reuse, maximizing unused urban space and challenging local zoning laws to help increase urban housing stock.

Underutilized urban land requires original residential design solutions

A residual piece of property on Stuttgart's city limits – originally thought of as uninhabitable – is the site of two new homes. Architect VON M converted the empty lot, located on a steep slope, by digging out nearly three storeys of ground to create a more level base. The presence of underutilized or unutilized space in cities provides a massive opportunity to help chip away at the lack of housing in these spaces. Creative architectural solutions are required to challenge the notion of what is usable versus unusable land. Though properties like this Stuttgart apartment are not commonplace, VON M’s manipulation of the plot reveals one means of increasing urban housing stock.

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Adaptive reuse transforms industrial sites into human-centric domiciles

Formerly a container space, the Eulalia House is one in a series of renovations executed by Madrid-based experimental design practice Burr. The designer’s intervention seeks ‘to become a strategic toolset to protect the industrial heritage of the city through land-use and occupation alternatives that allow to extend this typology’s life and avoid its demolition’, in order to mitigate the city’s soaring rent prices. Making use of unclaimed and other discarded objects in the warehouse, the designer converted the interior into a liveable space by taking an approach that targeted fittings instead of the building. The designers note that the demolition of former industrial sites in Madrid can cause the property value to rise by up to four times the original, deepening the lack of affordable housing in the city. The intervention expands our notion of what urban space is liveable and how it can be used to combat the affordable housing crisis. 

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Designers can use local zoning laws to introduce alternative housing typologies

Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) designed Canyon5, a five-unit housing structure located near Los Angeles’ Beachwood Canyon. The property was developed in response to the city’s 2005 Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance, which encourages the construction of smaller, more affordable homes built on compact lots. It's an effort to increase density and provide more affordable housing stock in unaffordable markets. The average home price in the area is $1.5 million, meaning that the construction of these particular homes likely won’t help those in dire need of shelter. Nevertheless, the project provides insight into how local zoning laws can be used to increase housing stock and how to do so while creating architecturally interesting and human-centric homes.

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Inventive architecture maximizes the untapped value of residual urban spaces

At almost half the width of the normative zoning requirements for new-builds in New York City, Narrow House gets its name from its unusually slender frame. Since 1961, zoning laws in the city prohibit buildings to be built on lots less than 5.5 m in width. At just under 4 m in width, the new home – for the cofounders and principal architects at Brooklyn-based studio Only If – was able to be built despite this, thanks to meeting other building criteria. Only If’s research identified approximately 3,600 unused lots in New York City – 600 of which are owned by the city itself – that cannot be developed because of reasons like those in the case of Narrow House. The construction of this project represents a solution to a niche problem with potentially socially impactful consequences. This cleverly used space that would have otherwise been eternally stuck in a bureaucratic no-man’s land demonstrates that such spaces can be transformed into viable living spaces.

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