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The Architecture of Affordable Housing
Sam Davis
University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1995, 208 pp., $35.00 hbk, ISBN 0 520 08758 5, $24.95 pbk, ISBN 0 520 20885 4
Urban designers who are concerned about fair and equitable communities must be concerned about shelter for those who cannot afford housing provided by the market. Housing also constitutes a significant part of the urban fabric, and almost certainly affects the sensual quality of cities, the urban designer's principal preoccupation. In these days of specialization, however, housing is probably considered outside the scope of urban design, and one might wonder why urban designers would be interested in the nitty-gritty details of housing design. This book on affordable housing-in the USA, and more specifically in California-is more than of general interest to urban designers for at least two reasons: first, it describes how regulatory mechanisms (a widely used urban design tool) affect providers of affordable housing; second, it provides insights into the way decisions are made in the design of affordable housing.
The term affordable housing, the author tells us, is the most recent incarnation of familiar terms such as low-income housing, social housing and subsidized housing. Affordable housing "receives direct or indirect financial assistance" and "is developed outside the purely market-rate private system" through some combination of private and public mechanisms (p. 1). While the author's professed intent is to discuss issues of designing affordable housing projects, the five chapters that comprise this book are as much about more general...