Smart City Radio recently held an interview with Avi Friedman, a world-renowned architect and planner working on the frontier of urban housing and planning issues. During the interview Friedman expressed his thoughts on housing affordability and sustainable communities, among other issues.
Much of Friedman’s work emphasizes affordability. (In 1988 Friedman co-founded the Affordable Homes Program at the McGill School of Architecture in Montreal, Canada, where he still teaches and serves as director.) Price inflation is the result of a fixation on large homes and a lag in technological innovation in the home-building industry, said Friedman. The high demand for huge homes influenced bylaws and zoning, which in turn encouraged large homes, wide streets and complex infrastructure.
The historical lack of innovation in the housing market has also prevented improvements in efficiency and cuts in costs. One of the reasons for lag, said Friedman, is that few builders have large enough operations to merit home-building on a large scale. Thus, there has been little incentive to go to scale on a factory level where innovation and greater efficiency can blossom. Friedman, however, is optimistic that innovation is beginning to take off in the housing industry. “I think in the next few years,” Friedman said, “we will see us becoming much more efficient at reducing the cost of housing.”
Friedman has made a career out of housing market innovation. In 2000 the design magazine Wallpaper named him one of the 10 people "most likely to change the way we live." In 2004 Friedman was highlighted on the television series "The Innovators," whose host called him "the most influential housing innovator in the world."
Friedman feels that the government and the public often focus too much on price-oriented fixes to affordability problems. Instead of figuring out how to subsidize homebuyers, Friedman said that problem-solvers should emphasize solutions that lower building costs. For example, homebuilders can leave sections of finished homes without partitions. This lowers the purchasing price and allows buyers flexibility to expand their living space when they can afford it and when they need it. (To read more about flexible design, read Northwest Hub’s article on the $99k Housing Competition.)
Friedman has designed housing prototypes that have earned him accolades and media attention. One such prototype, called The Grow Home, uses the unfinished interior concept to lower costs. The Grow Home is a 14-foot wide, two-story townhouse that contains about 1,000 square feet of living space. When initially purchased, the home comes only with a small living room, dining room, bathroom, and one or two small bedrooms. The upper floors are left unfinished, which allows future residents to customize as they see fit. Friedman followed up on The Grow Home with an updated version known as The Next Home.
On the topic of sustainability, Friedman enumerated “four pillars of sustainability:” economic well-being, healthy relationships between community and environment, social wellness, and cultural richness. “We’ve become very efficient at building developments—subdivisions—but we failed to know how to build communities,” said Friedman.
Communities, according to Friedman, are places that encourage the solidarity of people, culture, and nature in a manner that reinforces and strengthens the bonds of the community. Many devices, said Friedman, can contribute to community harmony, such as porches, benches and sidewalks that encourage interaction, public art that improves community identity and culture, or urban agriculture that gets the community working together with nature and with each other.
In addition to his teaching post at McGill, Friedman leads a private architectural practice and consulting firm. He has published extensively, authoring seven books. His most recent book is titled Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods.
