"Homegrown: Rural Studio's Ground-up Approach to Affordable Housing" (Impact Design Hub)

Homegrown: Rural Studio’s Ground-up Approach to Affordable Housing Located just south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is Hale County, a community best known for two things: poverty levels much higher than the national average, and ​Rural Studio​, Auburn University’s innovative architecture program that situates undergraduate students in the nearby community for an immersive, design-build studio course in their third or fifth year. The educational program is one of the longest running and most celebrated leaders in social impact design, learning from and supporting its local community by educating the next generation of “citizen architects.” Reflecting an increasing intention to examine, understand, and improve living conditions in the community that has become its home, the Studio’s latest design efforts add a layer of systemic understanding to a practice of providing dignified, long-term, and fundamentally local housing solutions to the residents of Hale County.

Rural Studio was founded in 1993 by architecture professors Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth with the intention of bringing the benefits of good design to an underserved population in the West Alabama Black Belt region. Once home to America’s cotton empire, the Black Belt has since battled poverty, a lack of social programs and infrastructure due to its rural isolation, and depleted soil from unsustainable agricultural practices. A lack of affordable public and private housing options for low-income residents means that many of Hale County’s poorest inhabitants end up living in substandard conditions, with their most accessible housing opportunity coming in the form of trailer homes that do little in the way of building equity and long-term wealth for their owners. A lack of jobs and industry in the region means that these same residents have little chance to earn a living that would allow them to change these circumstances on their own.

Since Andrew Freear succeeded as director in 2001, Rural Studio has evolved its work toward more community-oriented projects that respond to these local conditions by emphasizing a triple focus of community, housing, and food. These multi-year, multi-phase projects - such as the recently completed Newbern Library - continue the Rural Studio ethos of recycling, reusing, remaking, and delighting in local materials, while also maintaining the belief that affordable, good design should be accessible to all. The Studio’s most recent work includes the Rural Studio Farm - an ongoing initiative to grow food and live in a local, self-sustaining way - as well as a fabrication pavilion and woodshop to facilitate the design-build process. However, Rural Studio’s most compelling community undertaking has been the 20K Home Project, a ground-up attempt to design housing that is affordable, locally-built, beautiful, and efficient.

Rural Studio first approached the idea of creating housing that is affordable for the average Hale County resident in 2005 when, in an effort to focus its energy on the projects most likely to provide long-term benefits to the community, it began to experiment with and prototype a

new, locally-built, rural home design. The Studio observed that many lower-income residents in Hale County and the surrounding areas were living in secondhand trailer homes with few, if any, affordable housing alternatives. These trailer homes, though seemingly more affordable than a house at the onset, actually proved difficult for many residents to pay off; banks classify trailer homes as vehicles, and the loans given out on behalf of their purchase come with interest rates much less favorable than those accompanying a traditional home loan.

The project began by examining these omnipresent American trailer parks, where, in addition to being difficult for residents to pay off, homes counter-intuitively depreciate in value for each year they are occupied, to understand the factors causing West Alabama residents to end up in trailers and explore what alternatives could be created that would appreciate in value, as well as offer more affordable payments for their owners. The Studio hoped to address these local needs while simultaneously producing work that would maintain relevancy throughout the entire Southeast and potentially the country as a whole.

Through the 20K Home Project, Rural Studio aspires to design in a way that brings not just shelter, but economy and individual equity to the residents of Hale County, operating out of a philosophy which, in the words of 20K Home Manager Natalie Butts-Ball, “maintains the belief that everyone deserves good design.” The project is not only about how physical architecture can change a place, but how the entire process of research, design, and construction can be maximized to bring good design to an underserved community - what Acting Director Xavier Vendrell calls, “a hidden story of how you can bring economy to a place.”

A Unique Constraint in a Unique Environment Through its research process, Rural Studio found that, unlike the homeless individual one might imagine in a city or urban area, many of Hale County’s most impoverished residents own inherited land and simply lack the financial resources needed to build or acquire a physical shelter in that space. Acknowledging this as a particularly advantageous design constraint that did not require the team to secure land or necessary infrastructure, students at Rural Studio set out to determine exactly how much money Hale County residents could afford to spend on housing.

To do this, students calculated the monthly mortgage that would be affordable for a Hale County resident whose income depended entirely on governmental aid. After factoring in other monthly living expenses, Rural Studio’s researchers determined that the average Hale County resident would have approximately $80 remaining to devote to housing, which, in monthly installments, translates to a mortgage on a house costing $20,000. Although this dollar amount only reflects 2005 conditions and has since fluctuated, this calculation became the basis for the original $20,000 scope of the project.

After defining the minimum viable cost, students began designing and building new, locally-built rural homes that can be actualized (originally considering both material and labor costs at $12,000 and $8,000, respectively) within the calculated budget. The design process has been rigorous, requiring that students address homeowner needs and efficiency, as well as local architectural vernacular, in both materiality and projected energy costs. At one point, Rural Studio’s team considered shipping prefabricated units to Hale County, but it opted to instead source all materials locally and enlist the construction services of the area’s residents in order to bring employment and increased economy to the area.

As Rural Studio began designing its projects, students realized how difficult it was to work within such a tight budget. In the words of Vendrell, “If you have $20,000, and $10,000 or $12,000 is in materials, every little addition is important; windows, doors — 3’ longer [in some areas] makes a big difference.” Students soon discovered that while the cost of materials can be predicted easily, the cost of labor, utility installation, and applications for building permission by region, local municipality, community, and even neighborhood level, is highly variable. According to Vendrell, “After twenty designs, you learn there’s a reason why the industry isn’t making houses like this.”

However, to think of the 20K Home as a product with a fixed retail price is missing the point, says Butts-Ball. Instead, the number is a target for students, demanding they use a limited amount of resources and design as efficiently as possible so that the price point remains in an affordable range for their clients. According to Butts-Ball, students try to keep costs down more than they would if the monetary target was set at something closer to $30,000 or $40,000.

"Even though we know there will never be a fixed price to build a 20K Home, we still challenge the students to make the homes as affordable and durable as possible."

The Role of Academia Despite how difficult and time consuming the project has been, Rural Studio is in a position to meet its demands thanks to one particular aspect of its environment: the classroom. As an academic institution, the Studio’s primary objective is to educate architecture students. The time and energy necessary to meet the heavy research demands of the project, both upfront and throughout the process, come from students and visiting consultants in pursuit of educational goals and would not be possible with the fast turnaround time and economic efficiency demanded in the workplace. Academia also affords the Studio the ability to experiment and prototype possible solutions before handing them over to a client, luxuries not always available to architecture firms and developers, who are most often working quickly under the pursuit of capital gain and business growth rather than educational advancement.

For example, in early iterations of the 20K Home, students aiming for maximum efficiency had trouble choosing between the most sustainable, sleek materials and those that truly reflect the styles and traditions with which residents are comfortable and familiar. At one point in the process, Rural Studio experimented with using an unpainted, corrugated metal facade, something students and professors favored but neighbors thought resembled an industrial building or farm.

In the words of Vendrell, “We have to understand this as an architect: we are designing for the client, not for ourselves.” The team quickly reworked the design to be more reflective of regional styles and the desires of its clients, all the while staying true to the process’ local sourcing standards and projected energy cost requirements.

Rural Studio’s place at Auburn University enables a heavily researched, experimental process that has allowed — and continues to allow — for this type of revision and failure. The Studio has responded and adapted to various challenges and constraints throughout the design of the 20K Home Project, focusing less on a final product and more on refining a system that is continually, and sometimes unprecedentedly, responding to the specific environment it seeks to improve.

Holistic Design: From Financing to Construction Because the 20K Home Project required not only new types of building, but entirely new systems in order to accommodate them, the Studio has created unprecedented change along the way. With its ground-up approach, Rural Studio attacked the first barrier to homeownership: mortgage acquisition and affordability. The 20K Home is designed to have a mortgage that is affordable by the project’s clientele, but what this demands is much lower than the home loans typically offered by most banks, which, when expending equal resources to write a $20,000 mortgage as they do one for $120,000, have little incentive to opt for the lower amount. To address this issue, Rural Studio presented the challenge to Regions Bank, one of the Studio’s donors and sponsors, which is now partnering with the Studio to develop a mortgage specifically with the 20K Home Project in mind.

After addressing the front-end of the project and thinking about how residents could actually afford the product within the existing banking system, Rural Studio also realized that, in order for something close to the $20,000 budget to be realized, it would have to consider the entire construction process of the 20K Homes as well.

During the construction of its “product line homes” - three 20K prototypes designed and built with the intention that their construction documents could eventually enter the marketplace and be reproduced by others - the Studio experimented with contracting out professional

builders to construct one of the homes so it could better understand how the use of student labor may be distorting the realistic total cost. The team quickly learned that what is considered most efficient, timely, and traditional in the construction trade can vary drastically from what is necessary to ensure that Rural Studio’s economical design is accurately translated. Partnering with others to build the homes would only work if Rural Studio was explicit about how the houses are to be put together.

As a result, Rural Studio began designing instructions to accompany its plans and construction documents. “We need to be able to better communicate the way the houses are built [in order for them] to be affordable and perform the way they need to perform,” explains Vendrell. By designing these step-by-step directions, Rural Studio is enabling potential 20K Homeowners to do some of the labor themselves or to employ local residents to perform the labor, bringing jobs to the area and again firing on multiple cylinders to improve the local economy.

Beyond the Black Belt: A New Kind of Architecture Throughout the design process, Rural Studio has become very conscious of the project’s widespread plausibility despite its emphasis on local context. The 20K Home Project works especially well because it has been so heavily catered to, and designed for, a very specific neighborhood: Hale County. The materials used are local and the labor costs regionally-specific, and the designs generated are in response to Alabama’s specific context - its climate, its architectural traditions, and its land and infrastructure.

Thus, a similar house constructed elsewhere may not have similar demands, from the estimated mortgage affordability and the acquisition of land, to the materials and designs used to keep the house operating at a low cost over time. However, what can be translated is Rural Studio’s ​approach to the 20K Home Project — a heavily researched, experimental process that has allowed, and continues to allow, for revision and failure while providing a systems-based housing solution to the area. Rural Studio was able to engage in such a process due to the academic nature of its institution, and perhaps the biggest takeaway from its work is to realize the necessity of a similar entity opening up in other areas looking to adopt its model.

In addition to modeling a research process for this type of systemic design, Rural Studio is experimenting with other ways to tangibly share the ideas from the 20K Home Project, like designing a “kit of parts” for material costs and instructions that may help those working in other areas appropriately source their own local and efficient materials and labor.

Since labor costs are variable and not something Rural Studio can easily predict when estimating budgets for regions outside of Hale County, these construction guides not only make possible the employment of local residents but are also intended as another means of

addressing and lowering labor costs by equipping both volunteers and homeowners to perform the necessary construction themselves instead of enlisting professionals. The Studio’s incredibly thorough material budgets may also provide realistic shopping lists to both individual consumers and volunteer organizations like Habitat for Humanity who may be inclined to adopt the 20K Home model in the future.

The Studio is also considering how to best approach the size disparity between the 20K Homes and their accompanying lots, which are typically much larger than the intentionally small buildings. This resulting unused space can have the negative effect of reducing neighboring land value. Adding multiple units to one lot and creating similarly-designed, yet inherently bigger, community housing are potential solutions, though they will require Rural Studio to work more intimately with land regulators to change and adapt zoning ordinances. However, this research can only better increase the Studio’s understanding of how the 20K Home may be implemented elsewhere.

Rural Studio students will continue to test and improve the 20K Home, designing and building at least one new iteration each year as a part of what is ultimately an ongoing academic research project that will indefinitely find better ways to realize and address the needs of its community. This ​contextualized approach to supporting an underserved group while educating the next generation of architects remains Rural Studio’s biggest contribution to global discourse on both poverty alleviation and housing, rural or otherwise. The purpose of the 20K Home Project is to design an all-encompassing housing solution for a particular area, not a universal product that will work for everyone. But that very purpose of specificity and locally-driven design can be replicated and modeled elsewhere. It’s the process, not the product, that’s worth talking about.