The New Face of Affordable Housing

"Public housing used to mean fortress-like blocks and soulless rows of cheaply built townhouses. But now there's a new model: privately developed homes and apartments that are well-designed, well-built and attractive enough to win over wary neighbors. A growing number of architects, from established stars to ambitious up-and-comers, are looking to such projects as an opportunity to do innovative work."

"Groundbreaking architecture still makes up a relatively small percentage of the thousands of units of low- and moderate-income housing that are built in the U.S. each year. Most of the design is "competent," says James Stockard, curator of the Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard School of Design and an expert in the field. Even that, however, is progress. Until the 1980s, almost all low-income housing in the country was built by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, designed with an eye to quantity, not quality."