Michael Willis, FAIA, founded his own architecture firm in 1988. He believes that architecture can be a unifying social force. His firm focuses on multifamily housing, civic and community facilities, urban design, office interiors and water treatment plants. Michael Willis Architects has offices in San Francisco, Oakland, and Portland. Bay Area-based communication consultant and writer Kenneth Caldwell conducted this interview for arcCA.
arcCA: We have been designing affordable housing for over fifty years in this country. Are we learning anything?
Michael Willis: We have learned that affordable housing is not “one size fits all.” Housing is regional, in terms of economics, society, and design. We have learned that successful affordable housing connects people on several levels. It is important to have personal space indoors and out, space where you can meet your immediate neighbors, and a place where an entire community can come together. Security is essential, but security that does not isolate you. Affordable housing that is not connected to transportation, shopping, education, and social services will probably fail. And now, connection also means a DSL line in the apartment. From the aesthetic point of view, it is important that clients recognize these places as housing. But not recognize them as “poor people’s housing.” We have learned that using poor people to test an architect’s grand experiment is not a good idea. Some aspects of these experimental housing types fail and fall apart, and then we forget to look to the successful housing that has been built all over the country, and we think that we have to reinvent a new type. The result has been that we have created islands of experimentation that are not connected to the city. By contrast, I still think the mixed income approach resembles the condition in the city without any intervention at all.
arcCA: Acorn Village in Oakland and LaClede Town in St. Louis were both intended to be mixed income. Why didn’t they work? Why didn’t they reflect the city?
MW: I think LaClede Town is an interesting case because in form it looked like Marquis and Stoller’s St. Francis Square, with balconies and a village setting on streets. There were some key differences. St. Francis is a co-op, it’s owned by the people who live there. LaClede Town was rental. St. Francis Square’s hierarchy of public and private space was very good, and the design picked up on some subtle regional cues. LaClede Town’s incredibly eclectic tenant mix came as a result of something that would not be permitted today: the managers of LaClede Town selected who would live there—not on a first come, first served basis, but on the basis of creating an interesting mix. Early on there were artists, athletes, jazz musicians, writers, business people, and mail carriers. It was like mixing the invitations for a great party. You had people of incredibly disparate incomes living next to each other in a vibrant gumbo of arts and business and social interaction, which was also racially mixed. Over time, the diversity was not sustained. Management changed, and that wonderful stew disappeared. It is also important to remember that few architects could have designed affordable rental housing that would withstand the drug epidemic that hit lower income urban communities in the last few decades.
arcCA: So do you think maintenance, management, and the drug epidemic contributed to the failure at Acorn?
Town Center at Acorn, Oakland, CA, photo by David Wakely.MW: That’s part of the story. Acorn had a fascinating design, and I hope the renovation kept some of its best aspects. From everything I understand, it was very handsome when it opened—it looked like a modern Mediterranean village. Some of the details, like the flat roofs, resulted in leakage problems for which there was insufficient maintenance. When maintenance goes, pride goes with it. But the hierarchy of spaces—from personal to community—many of them worked. The apartment plans were very generous. But the density was just too great. This resulted in unobservable courtyards and little sense of immediate community. In the corners there were passageways that were dangerous.
When we were asked to renovate the project we looked at all of these physical issues. First we addressed some of the detail problems. We decided to build pitched roofs, which address the water leakage problem but also read like “home.” We looked at the hierarchy of spaces to understand where it worked and where it broke down. In some places, private and public clashed. Our plans incorporated the mature landscaping and refined the hierarchy so it’s clear what is public, community, and private. We also removed almost 20% of the units to bring the density down. In one place we took out an entire row and extended the street pattern into the complex and built a new community center and training facility. Elsewhere we removed units so courtyards could be seen from the streets. We wanted to make the complex less like a fortress but also more secure and less porous. So in addition to the public spaces that the complex shares, each grouping of units, or cluster, has a common courtyard, and each unit has its own private terrace.
arcCA: What about the maintenance issue now? Seems like a lot still hangs on that.
Courtyards at Acorn, Oakland, CA, photo by David Wakely.MW: This goes back to the “one size fits all” Federal subsidy issue. I think that private ownership, at least at Acorn, will improve maintenance. In a public ownership project, you are competing for attention with the other projects that the public entity owns. The result has been that you have ended up with situations where folks stockpiled warehouses full of mustard yellow paint that were not used for 20 years. That is an inefficient way to run housing complexes. With private ownership, and because it is mixed income, it’s in the owner’s best interest to maintain the property in good condition so that it can command the kind of rent necessary to pay the debt service.
arcCA: Throughout West Oakland, pitched roofs are replacing flat roofs. Aren’t we running the risk of pandering by making affordable housing look like middle class suburban housing?
MW: We are not interested in gluing over-scaled columns or pediments onto our buildings. But there is nothing inherently suburban about a pitched roof. There is a difference between designing buildings that are recognized as houses across the American culture and imposing a middle class suburban bias. We look at older projects to see what works in terms of identity, but also what works for low maintenance.
arcCA: What are some of the key patterns that we need to be cognizant of that can work in affordable housing?
MW: There is not a single style that should be promoted. In each circumstance, we look at the way things work. For instance, something that works most of the time is the notion of safe personal space, a good place outside of your house, and some place that allows you to interact with the people who live around you. I think that hierarchy of spaces works as a general approach to housing. We are still trying to understand the best size for a cluster. Right now we are thinking that maybe it is 8 to 10 houses, where you can reasonably know everybody in your half-block or so. You know their kids, you know whether they live in that neighborhood or don’t. It is important to point out that this kind of connection does not replace the role of security personnel, but is part of what makes a place safe—a kind of informal way you have of observing who is around you. If the numbers get too great, as they did at Acorn, the fabric breaks down.
arcCA: High rises have been largely discredited for low-income populations. And yet you did a high rise for the poorest population, the homeless. How do some of these thoughts apply to this dense, high rise project?
Cecil Williams Glide Community House, San Francisco, CA, photo by David Wakely.MW: The Cecil Williams Glide Community House is a high rise that requires a high degree of social interaction. It is designed into it. At Glide House you are signing up for a kind of interaction with a community that prevents isolation. You get connected not only to the people in the house, but to the larger Glide Community, and that helps you feel protected in the Tenderloin neighborhood. When you come off the streets and into the Community House, you learn the skills you need to be financially more successful. There are job skills, social skills, taking care of your family skills, there are clean and sober workshops, there are any number of outreach approaches that keep each and every one of those members from being isolated. In the typical, low-income high rise— and I’ll certainly say this of Pruitt-Igoe where I lived as a young boy—we were not connected. People were isolated from each other, and there was an uncontrollable ground plane. You had no idea who was going in and out, so you kept your kids on the “streets in the sky,” which were actually corridors. When those became unsafe, you drew in the barricades until you were isolated behind your locked door.
arcCA: In addition to appropriate levels of social support, what else makes for successful affordable housing?
Cecil Williams Glide Community House, San Francisco, CA, photo by Timothy Hursley.MW: Security is a paramount concern. Poorer people have no less need for security than their more economically successful counterparts. In the so-called better neighborhoods, the security is less obtrusive, but no less there. In the poorest communities, residents are often preyed upon by other poor people. So security needs to be a lot more visible. In Acorn and at Pruitt-Igoe it was impossible to feel secure— to get your groceries to your front door. Suburbia is secure in a very different way. It’s removed from the presumed influences of people preying on your economic and societal status. Police are not seen as a hostile occupying force.
arcCA: You’ve mentioned that housing is about jobs and society. We are seeing huge changes in welfare reform and in the subsidy of affordable housing.
Self-Sufficiency Center, Oakland, CA, photo by David Wakely.MW: The country moved to the right, and some would say moved to the right and rested in the middle. As it moved to the right, the notions of personal responsibility and welfare reform and the idea that society would no longer subsidize a kind of urban underclass took hold. The housing subsidies from the public sector were trending to zero. That’s something that the rightward tilt of Congress put upon HUD. In self-defense, HUD had to get out of the housing subsidy business. The HOPE VI programs were a response to that. Basically they said, “The Federal Government does not know how to do housing in St. Louis and Oakland and San Francisco and Cleveland. We’ll let you compete for a block of money and you solve it.” Different jurisdictions responded in different ways. As the housing subsidy was going to zero, so was the welfare subsidy. When those two lines hit zero, the notion is that the poor have learned the skills it would take to earn money so that they can pay rent to stay in the housing that was going to be charging something closer to market rent. So what did we see? We saw that the welfare centers should not be dispersed by program. AFDC, Food Stamps, Job Access, Interview Training, Job Training, Dress for Success programs need to be centralized and close to public transit. We designed one of these “Self Sufficiency Centers” in Oakland. They have become successful at getting people to work. The skills training is part of the affordable housing picture.
arcCA: So what happens to this new workforce if we have a downturn?
MW: I have to point out that we are seeing black unemployment figures below double digits for the first time in my memory. We hope the recent economic boom will make some permanent inroads in that entrenched unemployment base. There remains the concern about “last hired, first fired.” We have to understand the role of the Federal government. If we go back to FDR, I think there is a real role to ensure that all Americans can get up to a certain level that is the basis of hope for people to collect themselves and work towards a more secure future. With public housing, the idea was that it should be temporary. For all kinds of economic and societal reasons the Federal Government ended up supporting a permanent underclass. There were generations on welfare and living in substandard conditions.
arcCA: How do these ideas apply to the planning work that you are doing?
MW: Some of our thinking here sounds simple, but has to do with some of the other themes I’ve touched on. It is still about eliminating isolation. We are trying to reconnect the housing complex with the rest of the city. Some of the projects that we have been working on were created when authorities and their architects clipped the streets off and made islands of brave new housing. As residents, we didn’t think of it as isolated from the city; we thought it was this “special” place. We now understand that the best thing that can happen is to increase the links between housing and the rest of the city. It’s elementary. We are often working to correct a ’60s urban renewal approach by finding ways to reconnect projects through their historic links with the rest of the city. We go back and look at the networks. How is this place connected to every part of the city? How would I take a bus home? How would I drive home? How do I walk to a park? Is there a park? We begin by asking questions that are basically organizational. Before we start talking about design, we just try to understand the place. We are working in a terribly devastated area in Eastern Detroit, and it’s not far from Grosse Point, where people are sitting out on the sidewalks drinking cappuccino. Race plays a big role in this. When St. Louis tried to extend their successful Metrolink light rail system out to the suburbs there was a huge controversy. And that’s because a scenario was promoted in which somebody was going to come to your suburban house, knock you on the head, steal your television, get on Metrolink, and ride into East St Louis — that’s where the black population is.
arcCA: Whether we are talking about individual units, a complex, or a whole new plan, you are saying that housing design is about connecting people to economic opportunity?
MW: Yes. Your access to information, transportation, financial markets, is key. We are arguing for increasing the links. Almost like the heart surgeon, going in and clearing out the blocked arteries and reconnecting them with good arteries and letting the blood and the oxygen flow. If we have problems, we are not going to solve the problems by killing the organism, which is what I feel has happened to the cities. As your access to other parts of society grows, your access to a range of housing types grows. In community meetings, we tell people that they are city dwellers. But so often, because of these issues that we have talked about, they think of themselves as block dwellers—200 feet in any direction. But if you are a city dweller, you can have access to everything. You can go to the symphony, you can go downtown, you can go to the river, but your thinking, successfully conditioned by people whose advantage it was to keep you thinking small, keeps you from thinking about yourself as living in the city. You really are a city dweller, not a block dweller, not a house dweller, not a locked-in-a-room dweller. If we give people the liberating idea that they can actually live in any part of the city, they will start demanding access and demanding better connections to work, recreation, and education.
arcCA: What do you think is going to happen next?
MW: We see housing being built by two groups. One of those groups is the pure capital market, the people who can build the towers down by Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. The other significant force we are seeing here is the non-profit and not-for-profit housing corporation. The non-profit housing corporation is a significant player in keeping a mix of housing types in the city. I am speculating that we may see corporations building private sector housing. Not because they want to be in the housing business, but because they need housing for their workers. One of the reasons that the Stanford campus is expanding is housing for their faculty.
arcCA: And that will include low-income housing?
MW: It will include low-income because of where private corporations would be getting the land. They probably don’t own all the land that they are going to need for the housing. If they see that land is in public hands, and if alert economic development agencies realize they can get housing, there may be some interesting new partnerships. Cities won’t let corporations have land to make enclaves only for highly paid workers. I am quite hopeful that necessity is going to bring private corporations, public agencies, and non-profit housing developers together.
arcCA: Is there anything else you want to add?
MW: There is an unintended consequence to the improvements that have been made in racial tolerance and housing integration. There was a wonderful sense of intact neighborhoods that many black people my age grew up with. I was in a coffee shop recently and overheard a group of black people just laughing and talking about their old neighborhoods where everybody watched out for you. You could not misbehave because “Mrs. Carter was watching from across the street and the news would get home before you did.” That sense of community is a shared memory. So now some of us can live in places where eighty years ago there were no blacks or Jews. And yet the thing that we must be concerned about is losing that sense of community, and that brings me back to some of your earlier questions about design. There may be a change of emphasis not only in the design of the houses themselves, but in those interaction spaces—those places where you could have casual links with the people around you. We want to create places where you can be Mrs. Carter to somebody else’s kids; where there is small-scaled shopping, the barbershop, benches to sit and observe. I think we have to be mindful that we don’t gain a world and lose that soul. I am not willing to give up the soul.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2001, in arcCA 01.2, “Housing Complex.”
