2023 Spring Issue - 53

industry needs to provide better information to the
public about the actual costs of delivering housing
units, so that the YIMBYs can add substance to
their arguments. One of the strategies that helps
address NIMBYism is to have very extensive public
engagement that happens long before the approvals
process for a particular project. You need to have
conversations about what people envision for the
future of their neighborhoods and communities, so
that by the time you get to talking about a particular
project, it can reflect their interests. By-right development
strategies can be highly effective, providing
developers with predictability-if they know exactly
what they can build by right, and what the expectations
are for units targeted to a certain income level,
then they can be really creative.
What other innovations or trends are you
excited about in this arena?
McFADDEN: I'm hopeful that we can start to solve
some of the problems that have slowed down adoption
of modular housing. There are structural and
financial hurdles that HUD [the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development] is starting to
research and hopefully address. Hopefully that will
break some ground for banks and conventional
lenders and all of the other parties to allow the
modular business to be more institutionalized and
standardized across the market. Also, as a lender,
the Low Income Investment Fund is focused on the
preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing
and developing quick and accessible financing
tools for mission-aligned owners. Supporting existing
projects and getting them into the right hands
will quickly pay dividends by providing attainable
housing where it already exists, and not losing that
attainability if a property changes hands.
DUCKER: I'm cautiously optimistic. I don't think
we've made a lot of progress in repurposing land
devoted to retail into housing in the last 10 years,
but maybe we will in the next 10 years. There has
been a lot of discussion around office-to-residential
conversions, and I don't imagine that that will
solve the attainable housing challenge. But as an
industry, we're getting better at marshalling creative
responses to changing demand. It's not going to
change overnight.
PTOMEY: We're going to have a better ability to
deal with the labor shortage and high costs of
constructing housing through some of the technology
innovations that are happening. But it's not
clear yet which of these off-site manufacturing and
production approaches are going to take hold in a
way that is more than local or regional. The transportation
costs are a major barrier, and building
codes can vary widely in different places, making it
complicated for a company to provide manufactured
housing to more than one region.
DWORKIN: I think we will see interesting innovations
in special-purpose credit programs, loan
programs that can help members of economically
disadvantaged communities purchase homes. I'm
also fascinated by the new ways we can use manufactured
housing and component-built housing to
lower the cost of construction, both for single-family
houses and multifamily residences. There has been
a lot of advancement in this area, and we need to
talk about it more. I believe the technology for doing
this is going to increase exponentially. UL
RON NYREN is a freelance architecture, urban planning, and real
estate writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.
SPRING 2023
URBAN LAND
53
At the edge of the
city's Highland Park
neighborhood, Seattle
architecture firm Wittman
Estes purchased a steeply
sloping 5,040-squarefoot
(468 sq m) site and
designed a three-unit
urban infill project
completed at a cost of
$185 per square foot
($1,991 per sq m)-a 54
percent reduction in cost
from the 2019 average
of $338 per square foot
($3,638 per sq m) in
Seattle.
MIRANDA ESTES
2023 Spring Issue

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of 2023 Spring Issue
