Those looking for assistance in getting a well-designed affordable housing project off the ground smoothly may have to do little more than pop a CD-ROM in their computer or call up a Web site once a program initiated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gets under way next year.

“Design has become a main issue in affordable housing for the first time in a while,” said Deane M. Evans of Arlington, Va.-based Evans Consulting, the primary author of the new computer program Affordable Housing Design Advisor.

Evans described the advisor as a new electronic tool for affordable housing developers and community leaders looking to create better housing. The goal of the advisor, he said, is to increase the “design literacy” of those who often work with affordable housing projects who don’t have a strong background in design.

Design is important not only for the residents who live in the housing itself, but for project abutters and others with concerns about how the new buildings will fit in with the rest of the community.

“At HUD they felt as they looked around the country at affordable housing projects, which are already cost-constrained, that the emphasis on design was low, and in a lot of places there was low-quality materials being used, and they wanted to look at anything they could do to help out.”

As a result, a committee was convened consisting of representatives from the American Institute of Architects, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Local Initiative Support Corp., Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp., the Enterprise Foundation, the National Congress for Community Economic Development, and nationally known designers and builders of affordable housing to come up with a solution to design challenges.

“We didn’t just want to focus on public housing, but all affordable housing,” Evans said.

The advisor was designed with a number of core parts. First, Evans said, users could look at an overview of what the experts feel good design is in terms of affordable housing. “They can see how it meets people’s needs, how it fits in, and how it responds to the environment,” he said.

“It can help an affordable housing developer tactically,” he continued. “Everybody already thinks they know what affordable housing is going to look like, and there is a lot of work to do in overcoming that stigma. We’ve included 80 case studies nationwide of instances where high-quality design was used in affordable housing.

“People can look to those studies to show that an affordable housing development doesn’t have to be a motel-looking thing.”

The Right Questions
While using the case studies to help others break the stereotype of affordable housing, they can also be used by developers and others to gather ideas about elements that can be incorporated into their own projects.

The advisor also includes a series of checklists that developers can follow to make sure the building process goes smoothly.

The checklist contains more than 60 key design considerations that have been organized into nine major categories such as parking, landscaping and building layout. In each category there is a short description, which can also be printed out, and a series of drawings or photos illustrating the key concepts. All the illustrations are drawn from real-world affordable housing projects around the country and, by clicking on a project name, one can see a more complete description of the project in the advisor’s gallery section.

“The checklists have everything from the pre-selection of the design team to how to ask the right questions,” Evans said. “We encourage people to make a list of everything they need, from fire extinguishers to hose bibs, and at each phase check them off. You don’t want to be finishing up a project and then realize you need a hose out front so people can wash their cars.

“It costs a lot to put those things in after the work has been completed. Affordable housing projects are so cost-constrained already, you don’t want to be backing yourself into a box,” he said.

In terms of site selection, the advisor provides information to developers about working with what they’ve got. “A lot of these developers get stuck with bad sites,” Evans said. “You have to understand right from the start what can go there. If you’re building in an industrial area far from any health care facilities, is it really wise to put elderly housing there? People stuck with lousy sites are constantly trying to mash square pegs into round holes.”

The advisor may also include what Evans termed “mini-lectures,” where an expert in one aspect of housing would give a talk about an issue. That audio would be combined with a slide show-type presentation of examples of projects on the computer screen. “A lot of issues are too hard to try to simplify down; this would make it easier to understand,” Evans said.

“We pitched this toward the lowest common denominator,” he continued. “This program is aimed more at church groups building their first affordable housing project as opposed to big developer guys doing this for the tax credit.”

On the local level, Boston Department of Neighborhood Development spokesman Thomas Philbin said that good design is critical to any affordable housing project that comes into the city. And while the city provides its own design advisors on projects that will be using city funds, he said a design tool like the one proposed by HUD could make a nice complement.

“In Boston, we have very specific design guidelines,” he said. “It may cost more money to have some additional features, but I believe it makes a huge amount of difference.

“You don’t have to spend that much more money,” he continued. “Even small things like porches or moldings for a project will make it go much further.”

Philbin said a main concern for the city is ensuring that the “cookie-cutter approach” is not used for affordable housing projects. “I’m sure HUD will be using their national experience with affordable housing to address that issue.”

Evans said the committee worked on the program for about 15 months.

Alhough originally designed to be a document that could be accessed on the Internet, Evans said HUD is planning on releasing the advisor in a CD-ROM version sometime in 2001.

Still, he hopes that the advisor will survive in some form as a Web site, allowing it to evolve. “There’s a lot of things we would like to see happen with the site,” Evans said.

“We’d like to reverse-engineer the tool. Right now it’s focused on the user side, trying to reach out to the developers, but we’d like to make it so it could be used by people like officials who have to review projects.”

Another possibility would be an Internet-based forum where users could post questions and comments about their respective projects and learn from others who also use the site and may have faced a similar situation.

“One forum that would be useful would be what materials work and don’t work. That kind of discussion would be valuable to everyone in the game. They all want to know about the materials, and there’s no place people can go for that right now,” he said. “It’s got huge potential.”