HOUSING//THINKING · ARCHIVE 03 · EVAN SASKIN
The Test: Would You Want Your Kids To Live Here?
Walking London’s council housing with one question, and what the answer says about the work worth doing.
I have been walking London’s housing blocks with a question I can’t shake: would you want your kids to live here?
London has come a long way since the era of Right to Buy. Many councils are again answering yes. So much of the poorly designed and poorly built housing I have seen in my career came from nobody asking that question.
Stepped brick terraces. Generous balconies. A playground in the foreground that clearly belongs to the neighbourhood. Durable materials, human scale, and a ground floor that knows what it’s doing.
Housing built for habitation more than investors.
What makes affordable urban infill so interesting is exactly this: every constraint the affordability mandate imposes forces a better decision.
Smaller units demand better proportions. Tighter budgets demand smarter material choices. And the end user actually matters, because you can’t hide behind flash and price.
THE OBJECTION
I want to be careful here, because the twentieth century is full of housing that was cheap and nothing else. Constraint on its own produces nothing. Almost every project anyone points to as a warning was built under severe constraint, by people who were never asked the question.
What produces the good work is constraint plus an obligation. When you are building for a household that has waited years for the unit, there is no version of the project in which the end user is theoretical. That obligation is what turns a tight budget into a design problem rather than a subtraction exercise.
TWO OPTIMISATIONS
Market housing often optimizes for returns. That is not a moral failure — it is what the instrument is for. But it means the person who lives there sits downstream of the decision rather than being the reason for it.
Affordable housing — done well — optimizes for the people who live there and still has to make sense on paper. Both. At once. On less money.
That’s a harder problem. And a more honest one for architects to turn toward.
I spend part of every week on it now, as Developer-in-Residence at the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia. One hundred and eighty-six units in Truro, on the side of the work where the pro forma and the plan have to be solved in the same room. The constraints are real and they are not negotiable. They are also, reliably, the reason the buildings get better.
The question travels. It works on a council block in London, on a fourplex in Toronto, on a hundred and eighty-six units in Truro. It costs nothing to ask and it is very hard to answer dishonestly.
Housing//Thinking is an archive of writing, talks and podcast appearances on housing policy, design and delivery. Blue Lion Building.