Please make effort to develop your spreadsheet to provide you with analysis of your design. The spreadsheet should help you detente figures toward creating graphical representing of the following.
Total units compared to existing units (Unit type and distribution, ie. 3/2, 2/2, etc. This can be text) Total square feet compared to existing square feet Development cost without incentives (itemized: purchase cost, soft cost, construction cost, site improvement cost) Cost per unit without incentives Cost per square foot without inventives Itemized incentives $ and total Itemized incentives $ as a percentage of development cost Cost per unit after incentives Cost per square foot after incentives Proposed finance cost/amortization (for rental scheme this would be long term, for resale scheme this would be construction loan) Proposed rent or sale price compared to allowed (low income, low low income, market rate? ) Projected ROI expressed as a percentage of investment.
The current build condition of this block as many more in Parramore is that of a suburban layout.
Buildings were constructed respecting the setback for single family housing in a duplex configuration. This configuration does not make the best use of the available land and results in an non-cohesive block where the green vacant space is underutilized.
This is a tight-knit community and the current condition of the block is not reflective of this, nor is it an enabler of social interaction.
In order to ensure that the rehabilitation of this city block is successful, it is imperative to increase the density both to build up the community that will make up this block and to ensure financial viability of the project.
By inserting new dwellings among the existing ones, some of the original fabric of the block is salvaged. The new insertions allow the opportunity to create a courtyard space that will become a safe haven for kids within the block to play freely, a well as a community gathering area that fosters this close bonds this community is rich in.
Tying in with outdoor gathering spaces for the general community as proposed in a previous intervention, there will be a laundry facility that will serve the block as well as the surrounding household in need of this service.
Here the gathering outdoor space will face the busy street of Westmoreland, and will serve as a transition between the street and the commercial locale. People waiting for their wash and dry can socialize under the sheltered gathering space.
"Keep it Real" Benevolent Development Business + Dwelling + Community
Affordable Housing
Small Business Incubator
Community Center
A cooperative intentional housing community within Parramore.
Project Intent: very affordable desired housing with an integrated neighborhood support system.
Aerial Bold is the first map and typeface of the earth. The project is literally about "reading" the earth for letterforms, or alphabet shapes, "written" into the topology of buildings, roads, rivers, trees, and lakes. To do this, we will traverse the entire planet's worth of satellite imagery and develop the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.
A proforma is a calculation that allows you to test and refine a development strategy. It is short of like a business plan for development. As such it must contain all of the costs and all of the income. By using this information you can make an educated guess about whether a development idea will work. Knowing this make it possible for you to enter ring as a developer. However, since our class is about ground up development it is assumed that you will come with differently rooted proposals with other outcomes.
Row heading in your proforma may include the following (among others).
Hard Costs
Land acquisition
Construction cost - building
Construction cost - site
Cost subtotal
I'm going on a site visit tomorrow to 919 Randall to check out the inside of the unit. The owner of the building and the realtor will be there to answer any questions. If anyone wants to join, I'll be leaving from studio at 8:45 to meet up with them. I told them I'd limit the group to a couple people so that way we don't overwhelm the small units, so spaces are limited in case anyone wants to see the inside of these buildings and get any feedback. If you have questions you'd like to ask but can't join, just leave them in the comments and I'll ask for you.
Business of Architecture
Also, there is a two-part podcast on the architect/developer role on the Business of Architecture site. All his interviews are pretty good, but these tie into this midterm project on affordable housing.
"This is part 1 of my interview with Matthew Segal. As a young designer working for Jonathan Segal, FAIA, Matthew developed, designed and built his own 4-unit multi-family project in San Diego, California."
It is important that each of you be able to talk about the existing conditions of the block in a knowledgeable way. Therefore, you must perform the spreadsheet inventory/analysis of the existing condition; the capacity estimate. I want to see and hear proposals Thursday. Keep working through different versions. Be in conversation with each other about them.
Midterm Deliverables (subject to adjustment):
Existing Program Capacity Estimate (spreadsheet)
Proposal Calculations and Proforma. This includes possible funding sources.(spreadsheet)
Provide a list of possible funding sources and basic details affecting there use in the project. (text) These are in the docs I put in dropbox for you. Use them.
Proposal for property ownership (text). This is as much a social proposal as a development one.
Brief Context Investigation and other materials such as precedent or similar work that helps convey your concept (images, sketches)
Cull out the best of your model explorations and name them. I want you to be able to present options with thoughtfulness.
Prepare a plan set of one of the proposals (Site Plan, Floor Plans, Elevations, Sections. Get to the point where the proposal has some detail, scale and materiality. This should be a "rendered" set. Use tone, texture, photo materials, etc.
Your Existing Conditions Documentation (location plan, site plan, typical floor plans, elevations, sections) will form the basis for the presentation of your project. Use these drawings to create the relationships necessary to convey your proposal. To distinguish existing from proposed, make existing gray-line, proposed black-line.
From the Artist:
"The Parramore/Holden neighborhood is a disadvantaged neighborhood in the heart of Orlando, Florida. In 2011 I received a grant from a local arts organization which allowed me to start photographing it and it's residents. Through this project I hope to share art with the residents by giving a print to every person I photograph, break down stereotypes outsiders have of poverty and the neighborhood, and build a solid body of work that captures the vibrancy of the neighborhood before it disappears. I plan on photographing this region for many years to come." https://www.behance.net/gallery/4642105/ParramoreHolden
Keep it real.
Housing study in Parramore.
You are a benevolent developer. Someone who is interested in making the world a better place. I've heard it all before. You are interested in improving the living conditions of people of low or very low income. In order to make this happen you will solicit private funding but you also must maximize the potential grants and other assistance that is available.
The housing stock in Parramore varies but it is primary composed of wood frame single family bungalows from the turn of the century and small one and two story concrete block apartment buildings. I am fascinated by these. They are so brutal and so beautiful? Where did this type originate? We will look at a block of these units.
Site
The block defined by Randall, Colver, Jernigan, Westmoreland.
Randall, Colver, Jernigan, Westmoreland
For Monday
Existing Conditions Documentation (location plan, site plan, typical floor plans, elevations, sections)
Existing Program Capacity Estimate (spreadsheet)
Brief Adjacent Investigation
List of possible funding sources and basic details affecting there use in the project.
Proposal for property ownership scheme.
Be prepared to discuss the issues, in preparation for a charrette to follow.
Many of the issues you have been working with in our first project carry over into this one. For the most part you all have concentrated on activity in public space whether this is in actual publicly owned right of way or directly adjacent to it. By taking on the redevelopment of an entire block you will have to consider a variety of public space types. However, by introducing privacy, in the form of homes into this you now have more charged adjacencies.
Words
Community
Neighborhood
Association
Territory
Property
Ownership
Privacy
Presence
Inside/outside
Rules
Responsibilities
Stewardship
Time (cross sectional and longitudinal)
Density
Scale
Health
Safety
Happiness
Pets
Guests
Some of these words have similar meanings but there are meaningful differences.
Issues:
What is the origin of the current condition? What does it tell you about the place?
What other conditions are there in the immediate vicinity of the project? How does your project affect them?
Does the condition of property ownership affect the place? Investigate property ownership using Tax Appraiser website. How do you propose to organize property? What affect does the organization of ownership have on the community, the family, the individual? (Individual owner, Condominium, deed restricted neighborhood, etc).
What part does structure play, flexibility play? What are the limits of each?
Affordable Housing is a Civic Issue
with a mandate. I will post documents that provide more information about the following programs in our Dropbox share folder.
Below, from City of Orlando Consolidated Plan, Strategic Plan Section.
See especially, 91.215 (b) Affordable Housing Strategy.
B. Multifamily Rental Housing Rehabilitation
a. Summary of the Strategy: This strategy is designed to address the preservation of the affordable rental housing stock by improving its condition. The funds may be used for the rehabilitation of multifamily rental projects citywide. Funds awarded under this strategy may also be used as a local contribution by developers participating in the Florida Housing’s Low Income Tax Credit Program or any other Federal, State, or local funding program that targets the rehabilitation of multifamily rental housing projects in the City.
"Promote equitable, affordable housing. Expand location- and energy-efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnicities to increase mobility and lower the combined cost of housing and transportation."
Explore Incentives
The City of Orlando offers the following incentives to developers of affordable housing:
Federal, state or local funds
Capacity reservation set-asides
Reduced development fees
Impact Fee Grants
Density Bonus Program
*Alternative Housing Development Standards (encourage innovation)
The CDBG and HOME programs are formula based, entitlement grants provided by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
The City of Orlando’s Affordable Housing Assistance Program is intended to increase the availability of affordable residential units. The program coordinates and combines local resources and cost-saving measures into a local housing partnership and uses private and public funds to reduce the cost of housing.
How much money could you expect to acquire from these sources toward your development? This required developing a spreadsheet to test scenarios. (Other parametric modeling methods?)
More Money?
How would you go about soliciting other investment? Syndication? Trusts (REITs)? How does the investor affect the development picture?
The majority of gathering samples that were found were occurring along roadways which have been placed under the "improved" or "to-be improved" sidewalk locations through the community. What is still more apparent is the number of vacant lots and their relation to the neglected streetscapes. This shows a large area for improvement, and a chance for some of the successful practices within Parramore to be tested out in these neglected areas in order to improve them.
Distilled from this exploration are a few common threads within the community. The most successfully activated areas are not spaces which are pre-planned and pre-determined. The two common areas are the public entry space around local businesses and underneath shaded areas. The local business as a driver for gathering and socialization makes sense in terms of becoming a destination. These are typically businesses catering towards other locals, and so as familiar faces come by there are opportunities for conversations to arise, these events either acting spontaneously, occurring regularly, or being pre-agreed upon meetings.
Even more intriguing then the businesses are the common thread of shad as a generator. Uncaring of the actual particular location of the gathering, the two requirements for this gathering and activity are shade and seating. As shade in this context is a fixed constant, the variable is seating. Where there are large enough shadows to encompass a group, seating becomes any object that is portable enough to be brought within the temporal boundaries.
What is sought to be accomplished within this installation is a more structured provider of shading, for the purposes of recreating this activity and bringing it into areas of Parramore which are currently underutilized spaces. Since the local business as a generator is a costly and difficult condition to replicate and test across the community, the focus within this project is the idea of shading + seating = gathering.
The idea within this project is the reversal of the current process. In this installation, it is not shade which provides the foundation for seats to be placed, but seats placed which become the generation of shade. These are semi-temporary structures, easily dismantled and transported, that can be erected and left in an area for a finite length of time. Used individually or as a node within a modular system tessellating in any direction, these constructs are activated by the users and become displays of activity levels. The seats contain a large air bladder, and under the act of sitting this bladder is compressed to a specific point. The displaced air is forced through a series of tubes to the canopy system. Smaller balloons act as the activators for the kinetic canopies, carrying this motion up above the occupant and activating the canvas which creates a desirable shade boundary around the seating device.
As a singular object, this becomes an exterior meditative space; a conditioned environment for individual comfort. While arrayed in multiples in a tessellated chain, they can create different conditions based on their arrangements. No matter which way they are aligned, the end goal is a public gathering space, where previously underutilized spaces can be infused with new spirit and activity.
The kit of parts required for these modular parts would be three lightweight poles for structure, foam linear elements to provide for a semi-rigid structure in the canopy, a large air bladder within the compressed seating, and a series of tubes and smaller balloons to act as actuators for the canopy. The construction of these objects are to be simple enough that it does not require special training or complex tools to be built. The canopy material itself is to be sourced by the user. This creates a unique materiality across the community, and sense of personal elements so that way the residents can see their own choices and designs spaced within their neighborhoods and commercial areas. As of the current moment, very little of the resident's own handiwork is displayed thorough their own area, and instead the new developments being made are from outside sources with no input from the people who actually live there. As a sense of ownership and pride is established in the community, so then can a desire to improve it be generated.
Parramore exhibits a propensity for people to gather in unintended places. It seems gathering on the streets is part of the culture of place and I would like to foster this camaraderie and sense of community by intervening with a sheltered gathering space.
The observed gathering spaces occur mostly on artery roads, some of which will be serviced by the expanded Lymmo shuttle service bus routes.
It is at the intersection of these two where the intervention would see the most exposure and possibility of successfully being used.
As the gathering program has the potential to change throughout the day, this shelter would serve more than one function.
Being on the shuttle route it would become an attractive stop. Here system users can use the shelter as a meeting spot where they can wait for the rest of their parties, or simply wait for their daily commute ride.
The community that already gathers in nearby spots during the day to socialize, could use this area to shelter themselves from the elements making it an appealing option when it is too sunny/hot for comfort elsewhere, or the common Florida rain would make gathering elsewhere less desirable.
A third group of users would get the most benefit from the shelter during the after-hours. Homeless could use the shelter on rainy nights.
This intervention is to be developed in private property, blurring the line between public and private space. By being developed in private property this informal gathering space will allow the opportunity for informal/unlicensed commerce. Street vendors and performers can use this area to generate revenue and will be governed only by demand and the self regulating optimal occupancy of the space at different times; this and many other applied concepts are discussed in William H Whiteís ìThe Social Life of Small Urban Spacesî (1998). This space will be successful as it provides many of the requisites for a small urban gathering space to thrive: people watching, proximity to arterial and busy streets, plenty of seating opportunities (one linear foot per 30 square feet min), movable chairs, water features, and tree canopies among the most important.
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