By Lily Bryant

Budding young designers presented proposals that offered a window into the future of housing design at this year’s Affordable Housing Development Competition awards ceremony held on April 27.

Sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston (the Bank), the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Kevin P. Martin & Associates, P.C., and Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), this year’s competition gave participating students an opportunity to work with established designers and community developers to examine different communities, address their needs for affordable housing, and develop designs that will set the standard for affordable housing in the coming years.

Each of the eight participating teams addressed elements of green design, smart growth, and density to produce environmentally sustainable and fiscally viable housing proposals. The teams also reached out to the communities around the proposed developments to better understand their resource needs. The result: eight mixed-use, mixed-income proposals targeting the affordable-housing and community development needs of area neighborhoods.

The proposals delivered creative responses to a variety of neighborhood challenges such as poverty and rising gentrification, the difficulty of reusing church and/or school properties, reconfiguring a historic building in the South End, and developing infill housing in Brookline and Chinatown. 

Guest speaker Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy, noted that dealing with environmental and community issues up front is critical because it builds the concerns of various interest groups and the surrounding community into the process. He also drew pointed connections between the lack of housing in Massachusetts, the resulting exodus of many Massachusetts residents, and the corresponding impact on area businesses, which must either pay higher salaries so that workers can afford housing or risk losing access to their workforce. This, in turn, limits profitability and discourages new business.

John T. Eller, senior vice president of housing and community investment at the Bank, congratulated the student teams and quipped, “We hope you’re not part of the 22- to 34-year-olds who are going to leave Massachusetts, because we need you at work.” An increasing number of young professionals leave Massachusetts due to the prohibitively high price of housing in the area. T

The Winning Proposals

First Place: $10,000
Riverside View, Providence, Rhode Island
Student team: Harvard University: Andrea Broaddus, Natasha Hamilton, and Emma Rothfeld (Kennedy School of Government), Chris Lee (Business School), Jack Lin and Tim Talun (Graduate School of Design); MIT: Luke Schray (Department of Urban Studies and Planning)
Developer: Olneyville Housing Corporation
This initiative envisions remediating a brownfield and developing 37 affordable rental apartments, seven affordable homeownership townhomes — each with a first-floor extended-family unit, and 10 market-rate homeownership townhomes on a site adjacent to Riverside Park and the Woonasquatucket River Greenway.

Second Place: $6,000
Oak52, Brookline, Massachusetts
Student team: Harvard University: Nelly Nieblas (Kennedy School of Government), Jan Schultheiss (Graduate School of Design); MIT: Matthew Brownell, William Ho, Sagree Sharma, Thacher Tiffany, Kate Van Tassel (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), and Amy Merritt (Center for Real Estate)
Developer: Brookline Housing Authority
This initiative calls for developing a 23-unit affordable rental multifamily building, two-story community space, and two workforce/homeownership and three market-rate homeownership townhomes (each with rental units) on either side of an existing 10-story public housing facility in Coolidge Corner.

Third Place: $2,500
The Residence at 1088, Chinatown, Boston, Massachusetts
Student team: Harvard University: Christopher Ward (Kennedy School of Government), Tawan Davis (Business School), Soohyun Chang (Graduate School of Design); MIT: Janelle Chan, Meredith Judy, Helen Lee, Nakeischea Smith, and Aaron Stelson (Department of Urban Studies and Planning)
Developer: Asian Community Development Corporation
This proposal recommends a mixed-use, mixed-income development of 150 affordable and market-rate housing units (homeownership and rental) plus community space, building on community-based master planning for the Chinatown-South End neighborhoods.

Honorable Mention
Temple Green, Somerville, Massachusetts
Student team: Harvard University: Matthew Ladd (Graduate School of Design) and Chris Magnusson (Divinity School); MIT: Rana Amirtahmasebi and Carey Clouse (Department of Architecture), Molly Markarian (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), Carolyn Choy and Kevin Sheehan (Center for Real Estate)
Developer: Somerville Community Corporation
This initiative proposes the conversion of an existing church property in Somerville to create a mixed-use development, reusing the church, converting the rectory into job-training space, and new construction of 59 mixed-income townhomes and 22 rental units as well as retail space.