Affordable Housing Needs To Be Driven By Our Designers
I believe the key to designing truly affordable housing is to experience spending your own money – because it’s risky, painful, and teaches us more than we sometimes care to admit.
Considering that the building industry is one of the world’s largest employers, it’s interesting to me how few professionals within our industry have ever built their own homes, using their own money, from concept to completion. I would even go as far as to estimate that number to be less than 1% of our global design and building professionals.
For me, there is no better way to learn how to produce affordable housing than running a complete housing project using your own money. Why? Because you learn lessons you will never learn spending your client’s money.
To be honest all the trades, councils, and supply chain can help to reduce the cost of building, it’s actually very easy, but today I will focus on our architectural design community. That’s because I believe you can’t truly design an efficient and affordable building until you understand the value of putting your money where your mouth is.
Let me explain: when it’s your money, I believe you think more about producing an optimally designed and built building for the money – because every bad decision you make really hurts – but it’s a valuable lesson that we only seem to learn when it’s your pocket being stretched.
Money is unfortunately determining the outcome of our buildings, spaces, and communities. It’s directly influencing how we live. So wouldn’t it be great if everything cost less, and affordable homes was actually a thing?
Yes, it’s true that some clients feel that the bigger the price tag, the better the building. Unfortunately, in over three decades of working in this industry, I haven’t seen one case where I believe this to be true. In fact, most of my wealthier clients are some of the most cost-conscious people out there—maybe that’s why they’re wealthy?
A Costly Mistake
I had a discussion yesterday about an experienced New Zealand based architect who decided to build her first house to sell using her own money, and she’s likely to finish the project substantially with loses – to the tune of NZD $500,000 (USD $300,000), in fact, because the market hasn’t met the asking price of what she has designed and built.
She’s obviously very upset and realizes she’s made many mistakes. To me, this indicates that she hasn’t understood the importance of combining good design with the specifying of more efficient building systems, sustainable products, and good procurement practices. For me, these three attributes need to operate in unison if projects are to produce optimal results, including affordability and profit.
I can almost guarantee this, though: she will be a far better architect after this experience if she learns from her mistakes. And as I mentioned before, she has been operating as an architect for a long time, using only her clients’ money—so there was little risk for her.
Milking The Cow
I know far too many architects who, to put it bluntly, charge like a wounded bull, clipping the ticket on the products they specify (which their professional bodies forbid, by the way) and charging very high design fees. As a civil engineer with extensive design experience, I find this behaviour concerning – but it’s nothing new.
This “clipping the ticket” can influence negatively which products and building systems they specify, and the client is usually clueless about what’s going on. I would prefer to see architects charging on a time and materials basis because I don’t see any value in charging a percentage of the build cost as their fee. To the best of my knowledge, no other profession does this within the industry.
A Case For More Architecturally Designed Houses
Now, I realize I’m on my soapbox and may be sounding very negative, and no doubt I will have lost many architects already, but the reality is that a very low percentage of houses are designed by architects – around the 1% mark, I believe. If architects adopted a fairer fee structure, perhaps we would see wider use of their services in housing projects of all budgets, not just the high-end homes. Maybe our communities would look better for it as well?
Optimal Design Please
For me, we need to stop thinking of the design discipline as solely the look and use of a building. It needs to extend to optimally designing a building by considering the building systems, sustainability, and product health considerations to produce better structures.
I feel architects need to work with structural engineers and builders in the design process, thereby producing an easier, more efficient, and more affordable house to build – and it can still look and function great, too.
Think about it, most of the architecturally designed award-winning houses have been simple in form and completely functional.
But above all, I want to see more designers putting their wallet where their mouth is, because I feel the industry will be a better place for it.
My advice
If you’re starting out on your first self-build and want to use an architect, please shortlist architects who have built their own houses with their own money. It may just save you a lot of money and heartache.
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