My neighborhood of Deer Park has fourteen Moderately Priced Dwelling Units. They're part of Montgomery County's nationally-recognized program requiring new subdivisions to set aside a percentage of units for people of limited means. Bought new in 1993 at market rate by the
Housing Opportunities Commission, the county's housing authority, the homes were rented out to families in need. Despite having lived here for ten years, I could not tell you where they are. I know that they're townhouses, but there are far more than fourteen townhouses in my neighborhood. The families who live there look exactly like the families living in the market-rate homes around them. They are inconspicuous, and that's how I - and they - like it.
Many people I've met
tend to conflate "affordable housing" with "public housing," and raise concerns - whether from firsthand experience or out of fear - that they bring blight and lower property values. It's hard not to get confused by the
many programs the Housing Opportunities Commission operates, from
group homes for the disabled to "workforce housing" built for households making less than 120% of Montgomery County's median income, or $120,000 a year. In such an expensive area, a surprisingly broad swath of people have difficulty finding an affordable place to live.
But any proposal to build affordable housing is often contentious, and if built to look cheap, the finished product will stigmatize its residents. If our goal is to create fully integrated neighborhoods, we need to build affordable housing that seamlessly blends into the local context. This can be done by using materials similar to those in more expensive homes, "disguising" the affordable units as larger, more expensive homes, and by mixing them in so as not to create a noticeable "ghetto" within the neighborhood.
The examples below are a mix of owner-occupied units purchased at below-market rates and rentals managed by the Housing Opportunities Commission or, in the case of Fallsgrove, the City of Rockville's
housing authority.
These MPDUs (at left) in the Gatestone subdivision in White Oak are actually stacked two-story apartments, they use the same materials (brick, white trim) and the have the same massing (three to four stories, roughly twenty feet wide) as the more expensive townhomes surrounding them. Whether or not you can tell that there are two building types here, they both appear to be of similar value.
In the Fallsgrove planned community in Rockville, builder Pulte Homes designed a duplex that looks like a large single-family home and fits on a regular single-family lot. One unit uses the front door, and another has a door on the side.
From the street, it looks like every other house on the block. As a result, the affordable units are less intimidating to the neighbors and more attractive to the occupants themselves, giving them a greater sense of pride.
Designed by the firm
Duany Plater-Zyberk, the
Wyndcrest neighborhood in Ashton was a very early example of New Urbanism, which dictates that homes of different sizes and price ranges are mixed together. Instead of relegating the affordable units to their own area, Wyndcrest places single-family homes (at left), market-rate townhomes (the end units), and subsidized townhomes (middle units) around a central green, allowing people from different walks of life to mingle.
Bonifant Park, a subdivision in Layhill, makes it glaringly obvious where the affordable housing is. Not only do the six duplex homes have different materials (siding instead of brick) and massing (three stories instead of two) than their
single-family counterparts, but they're
placed closest to busy Bonifant Road while the more expensive homes are cloistered on a private cul-de-sac. A layout like this sends a message, intentional or not, that the residents of subsidized housing are not valuable members of the community.
In Montgomery County, affordable housing in new development is a fact of life. But nowhere does it say that they should look affordable. Both out of respect to their future occupants, and in deference to often-wary neighborhood associations, those who design and build subsidized housing should make them invisible to the untrained eye. Doing so may seem more expensive, but the value of a stronger, fully integrated community should make the extra cost worth it.