Housing Crisis
For the last few years, many Americans were being forced out of their homes as a result of the housing crisis, but the foreclosures aren’t all to blame for the housing crisis. The housing market itself needs to undergo a major transition as far as design to accommodate potential homebuyers in suburban areas. Suburb demographics are changing and we wanted to explain how this correlates to home design.
Housing Crisis | New Suburbs
American suburbs aren’t what they used to be as immigrants begin to make suburbs their number one choice over urban living, lets take a look at the new demographics explained by the New York Times in their story on the housing crisis and home design.
Take Cicero, Ill., a Chicago suburb that we studied as part of a new exhibition on the housing crisis at the Museum of Modern Art. The town may be infamous as the base of Al Capone or the site of anti-integration protests in the 1950s and ’60s, but today 80 percent of its residents are Latino, half of them foreign born.
Cicero is representative of a suburban transformation that went little noticed during the housing bubble and bust: suburbs have replaced inner cities as the destination of choice for new immigrants.
Indeed, nearly half of all Hispanics now live in suburbs, and new arrivals favor them over cities by two to one.
A lot of you may be thinking, okay I see that their are many more immigrants migrating to the suburbs, but how does this affect home design in any way shape or form?
Housing Crisis | The Need for New Design
You see many single home properties out there are just too expensive for these immigrants to afford, so oftentimes they’re forced to share the property with several other families. If we could redesign some of these homes so that one or two families could pay the rent with no problem and real estate agents wouldn’t have a problem filling up these properties on the market with people that won’t default on their mortgage, thus improving the overall state of the housing crisis.
Just how will they be able to carry through with this housing crisis solution? The New York Times reported on a clever solution, but unfortunately in order to pull this off, their would need to be some major readjustments to city code, at least for the city Cicero which is the control city for their study.
What remains is a wealth of steel, masonry and concrete that could be recycled into flexible live/work units. Rather than force Cicero’s residents to contort themselves to fit the bungalows, their homes can expand or shrink to fit them.
There’s one problem with such a plan: it’s illegal under Cicero’s zoning code. The town’s rules are typical of most suburbs, including the segregation of residential, commercial and industrial facilities; prohibitions on expanding and reusing buildings for new homes and businesses; and tight restrictions on mixed-use properties. Cicero’s code also defines “family” in a way that excludes the large, multigenerational groupings now common across the country.
However thats not the only idea that many real estate analysts are suggesting for the housing crisis. Another popular idea is to make properties more like co-ops in which each purchaser buys some shares on the rooms that they’ll be occupying. No individual could purchase the land, the land would be in the hands of a “community land trust.” What ideas do you have about how to fix the housing crisis?
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