High Style Meets Low Budget Architecture

Architects and developers of affordable housing, with the help of city planners, are beginning to inject more imagination and innovation into the design for modest homes.

In the greater Milwaukee area, a partnership between the American Institute of Architects’ Wisconsin’s southeast chapter and architecture students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is reinventing residential design in the lower price points, producing drawings for three modernist homes will sell for about $150,000. Students will design 1,400 square-foot infill homes for vacant lots in central city neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Racine, and Waukesha.

The local Habitat for Humanity is adding more sensitively designed roofs, windows and porches to its standard house design that will be part of 22 new units this year. And the city of Milwaukee promises to streamline approval for proposals for affordable housing to go on city-owned land that adhere to prototypes of modernist and neo-traditional designs.