Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Emilie Taylor Welty
Home ownership in the US is a way to build generational wealth, roots families in a place, and stabilizes their housing costs in a way that improves the quality of life. Yet increasingly in cities the price of housing is at odds with Average Median Incomes pushing working class families further away from job centers and exacerbating income inequality. In effort to combat these forces and create scores of affordable homes in historic New Orleans neighborhoods, the architecture firm Colectivo has been partnering with non profit developers, city agencies, and contractors to rethink the housing delivery model to ensure that families have access to well designed energy efficient affordable housing. The initiatives borrow from the self-help housing models in combination with early stage cooperation between builders and architects to design for climate, market, and neighborhood nuances of New Orleans to produce affordable and high quality homes. With each housing model prototype and subsequent iteration, the design team and contractors work together to identify opportunities to streamline the material and detailing efficiencies, and work with past home owners to identify spatial and material opportunities to improve the quality of the designs. What has developed out of this body of research and collaboration is a design strategy which blends the local typologies, cultural and contextual approaches with a pragmatism in layout and detailing. This paper looks at this collaborative approach and the 35 homes (6 prototypes) that have been built through this endeavor and outlines how this collaborative model is a scalable response to a widespread need.
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
