Designing Supportive Housing

From an April 2002 interview in Metropolis Magazine:

“Rosanne Haggerty is the new landlord of the Andrews Hotel, a grim vermin-infested joint at the corner of Bowery and Spring Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is also founder and executive director of Common Ground Community, a nonprofit organization that has purchased and converted a handful of historic buildings, including the Times Square Hotel, into some of New York’s most progressive low-income housing — work that last year earned her a $500,000 ‘genius grant’ from the MacArthur Foundation.

After four years of field research that took Haggerty and her staff from the public shelters of New York to the capsule hotels of Japan, Common Ground Community is set to begin transforming the century-old Andrews into something they call First Step Housing. Working with New York architects Marguerite McGoldrick and Gans + Jelacic, and more than 150 homeless men and women who contributed feedback, Haggerty plans to combine elements of the Bowery’s dying flophouse tradition — $7 a night, no lease, no questions — with smart management, on-site social services, and space-efficient modular design. Recently she spoke with Douglas McGray about the project’s design considerations — and its lessons.”

Rosanne Haggerty:

“Social scientist Christopher Jencks zoned in on the loss of the cubicle hotels as a specific cause of the rise of single-adult homelessness. That got me thinking, Why don’t these places exist anymore? For years I’d get close to the question and then recoil because these buildings were so squalid. The quality-housing advocate in me couldn’t comprehend how one could responsibly advocate their resurgence. It finally occurred to me that until not-for-profits started working on them, single-room occupancies had also been looked at as substandard forms of housing. Then it clicked — it’s more of a failure of imagination on our part than anything embedded in the model.”

After extensive research, including two months in Osaka, Japan studying the flexible use of limited space, interviews with individuals and groups of homeless men and women, including feedback on three rounds of prototypes, Common Ground developed a design that was attractive, affortable, and secure.

“The main reason people are remaining on the streets is safety. They perceive themselves to be more secure sleeping in a public space than in the city’s shelter system. People were very keen on the idea of metal detectors, very concerned about what the roof material would look like — how secure it would be. They were concerned about the strength of the lock and the durability of the construction....

Somebody had a very good line. He said, ‘You don’t want it to be a doll house, but you don’t want it to be a cell either.’ A lot of these folks have been in psychiatric hospitals or in jail, and they don’t want an environment that reminds them of that. Things as subtle as being able to move the furniture around — not having it nailed down — being able to get control of a degree of privacy in the space, having a window that opens and closes onto a central corridor seemed to take something that could have been viewed as institutional and make it cozy....

Frankly, design makes a significant difference in terms of the atmosphere of calm and respect that you establish. People respond behaviorwise to being in that kind of environment. Keeping maintenance costs reduced is also a consideration. We need spaces that can be cleaned easily, panels that can be removed and replaced without having to trash the whole unit.”

The First Step units are prefabricated, ship nearly flat and can bolt together in almost any commercial space.

Many of the housing projects incorporate social services:

“Supportive housing is permanent housing with social services for the formerly homeless, people with mental and/or medical disabilities, the elderly, and individuals with low-income. Supportive housing combines affordable accomodations with services like mental health and drug addiction counseling, job training and placement, community activities, and help with life skills like cooking and money management.

Supportive housing was created by non-profits around the country as a more holistic response to homelessness. Approximately 70% of homeless single adults in the United States have problems like mental illness, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS — problems which contribute to their homelessness. By offering a variety of support services designed to address these issues, supportive housing has paved the way for a more effective approach to preventing homelessness....

Two long-term government studies have shown that more than 83% of the homeless individuals placed in supportive housing have remained in permanent housing and have reintegrated themselves into mainstream society.”

See the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the Supportive Housing Network of New York.

Common Ground and the Architectural League of New York are currently running an open competition to design a new “prefabricated individualized dwelling unit.” The registration deadline is July 11, 2003. The design entry submission deadline is 10 AM, August 25, 2003.

“Up to four competition winners will be chosen. Winners will each receive a cash prize of $2,000 and will be engaged to develop their proposals for manufacture and installation at the Andrews House, a lodging house on the Bowery in Manhattan, for which they will be paid a design fee. An exhibition of entries will be mounted in Manhattan in October 2003, and displayed on the competition website. A publication documenting the competition may also be produced.”

See the First Step Housing Web site for more detail.