By Laura Krawczyk, UCLA Luskin School MURP ‘15
Our UCLA team had the privilege of being awarded second place along with a $10,000 prize in HUD’s 2015 Innovation in Affordable Housing Competition, held April 21, 2015. This is the second year of the challenge, created to encourage research and innovation in affordable housing, raise practitioner and future practitioner capacity, and foster cross-cutting solutions within the design and community development process. Guidelines require interdisciplinary collaborations through teams composed of graduate students from at least three different disciplines across the fields of architecture, urban planning, public policy, and finance. UCLA team members included graduate students Laura Krawczyk and Precy Agtarap of the UCLA’s Urban and Regional Planning Program, Edith Medina Huarita of the UCLA’s Public Policy Program, and Luis Ochoa and John Whitcomb of the UCLA Architecture Program. The trip to Washington, D.C. was made possible through generous sponsorship by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and UCLA Ziman Center’s Howard and Irene Levine Program in Housing and Social Responsibility.
The competition aims to replicate real-world challenges, selecting a site and allowing students to work with the local public housing authority in developing an innovative design and financing structure while also addressing the current resident population and larger neighborhood. “It was a great collaborative experience,” said Agtarap, “We learned to compromise and prioritize the needs of the community.”
This year’s site was Bayou Towers in Houma, Louisiana, which is approximately an hour’s drive southwest of New Orleans. The proposal asked teams to address social, economic, and environmental issues surrounding the redevelopment or rehabilitation of an existing 300-unit senior public housing site. Working with the Houma Terrebonne Housing Authority, our UCLA team proposed a deep green retrofit of the existing building, based on the idea of housing as a platform for individual and community health.
Since the most influential determinants of health are social and environmental factors, the proposal created an integrated wellness strategy by promoting preventative healthcare, active lifestyles, and fresh food options. “I learned how valuable and necessary it is to work with interdisciplinary teams to fully understand the needs of the people we want to serve,” said Medina Huarita, who worked on developing multi-faceted services and programming including connections to indoor and outdoor flex space, an edible garden, and intergenerational programming. In addition, an on-site telehealth suite would allow for residents to communicate with on-call physicians in real time via video conferencing technology.
The design promoted a “Sustainable Second Life” for the building, repurposing materials and installing new energy efficient systems to reduce environmental impact and building operating expenses. Each unit was given a balcony for private outdoor space, made from durable phenolic resin panels. Energy efficiency was achieved through a combination of passive and active systems, including air flow panels to reduce humidity in units, water solar heating, photovoltaic energy panels, as well as electrochromic windows that reduce heat gain during the warm summer months. The project was financed through a combination of low-income housing tax credits, Rental Assistance Demonstration vouchers, and subsidies through strong partnerships with local healthcare partners.
“The great part of this interdisciplinary competition was getting our ideas and perceptions from our own field challenged,” said Ochoa. “There were several instances where this challenging of ideas not only made our design and project better, but it truly made it an interdisciplinary one where all our ideas merge together into a single and cohesive project.”
To download the team's "2015 HUD Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design & Planning Competition" PDF, click here: HUD IAH Presentation Phase II.
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