Mueller is a 700-acre redevelopment of a former airport into a health-focused master-planned community just three miles from downtown Austin, Texas. By 2020, Mueller is projected to have over 5,700 single family and multifamily units, a quarter of which will be affordable for low-income families. The Catellus Development Corporation worked with master planners ROMA Design and McCann Adams Studio to promote community health and wellness, to increase pedestrian activity, to improve air quality, and to utilize low-emission building materials.
Mueller’s various facilities and amenities are designed around the principles of social interaction, open space preservation, and active lifestyles. Tree-lined sidewalks and protected bicycle lanes provide shade and connect to a comprehensive trail system, retail, and recreational parks to encourage walking and bicycling. To promote physical fitness, Mueller provides sports facilities, playgrounds, a stretching area, and outdoor showers. A six-acre orchard and community garden provides residents with a seasonal harvest. Residents have initiated over 40 different clubs and interest groups and over 70,000 people attend large scale community events annually. The developer has facilitated social interaction these interactions through a block party at move-in and through physical design, including front porches, stoops, gardens, and alleyways in residential areas.
On the site of a former railroad engineering works and popular recreational facility, Wolverton Park, a mixed-use community with an array of building types that acknowledges the area’s history, has quickly become one of the most desirable places to live and work in Milton Keynes, a planned community near London.
Wolverton Park has been completely transformed through a carefully calibrated mix of housing, commercial space, history, and deep community involvement. The 4.25-ha (10.5-ac) site has 300 mixed-income housing units, 2,787 square meters (30,000 sf) of commercial space, and one hectare (2.5 ac) of open space. All of these new uses are woven into Wolverton Park’s original facilities through cutting-edge design. A number of Victorian-era industrial buildings on site, including three that were designated as historically significant structures, were in an advanced state of disrepair, including an aging canal that has been restored as an important on-site amenity.
Red Oak Park is an urban infill residential community in Boulder, Colorado, that concentrates on making affordable housing available by rehabilitating a deteriorated mobile home park. The 59 single-family detached, duplex, and triplex units on a 3.85 acre (1.6 ha) site are permanently affordable and primarily rented to the former mobile home park residents. The project includes 21 single-family detached units and 38 duplex and triplex units. Construction began in June 2010 and the community was completed in August 2011.
Using a creative financing structure, the new homes were built sustainably to house residents earning between 30-50% of the area median income. The development incorporates sustainable and energy-efficient principles with socially conscious and community-oriented housing.
Armstrong Place creates an environment for multigenerational interaction in affordable housing by combining 116 affordable senior apartments with 124 below-market-rate townhouses and 7,600 square feet (706 m2) of ground-floor retail space on 3.1 acres (1.25 ha) in the Third Street corridor in San Francisco, California. The senior apartments are targeted towards very-low-income seniors with 23 reserved for formerly homeless seniors. The townhouses are geared to first-time homebuyers whose annual income is between 60%–120% of the area median income. The development covers a full city block, allowing for denser housing to be built around central communal green spaces.
In 1970, America Park was one of the worst public housing projects in Massachusetts. One-quarter of its 408 units on 58 acres (23 ha) were boarded up and condemned. The tenants, recognizing that the local housing authority was not able to properly manage the project or provide the services they needed, organized themselves through an elected residents council. Wanting to bypass the state housing authority, whose regulations were seen to have exacerbated conditions, the residents council refused public renovation funds.
Two purposes—the social vision of the federal HOPE VI housing program and the livability principles of new urbanist design—are coming together in the High Point development. High Point, a 120-acre (49 ha) residential neighborhood with a mix of incomes, ethnicities, and household structures, invites social interaction and fosters community identity. It replaces a post–World War II public housing project of 716 units with an environmentally conscious community of 1,600 new housing units, 45 percent of which are affordable and low-income rentals being constructed by the housing authority, and 55 percent of which are for-sale market-rate units or rental housing for seniors being built by for-profit and nonprofit developers.
Situated in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Austin, Texas, Chestnut Commons is a transit-oriented infill community featuring 32 cottage-style residences and 32 for-sale flats above garages. This housing typology–smaller-than-average homes arranged to maximize density–has the advantage of making homeownership more affordable, with initial sales prices ranging from $149,000 to $260,000. The developers of Chestnut Commons–locally based Momark Development LLC, and Benchmark Land Development–donate half of the project’s profits (beyond an initial 20 percent gross profit threshold) to the nonprofit Austin Community Foundation, resulting in a total contribution of over $1.1 million toward community development in the city.
Erie-Ellington Homes is a 50-unit urban infill residential project in the historic Erie-Ellington neighborhood of Dorchester, a district of Boston, Massachusetts. Located on seven scattered sites on 3.53 acres (1.42 hectares), the project’s 19 duplex and triplex buildings and a small community center blend into the neighborhood along Erie, Ellington, Fowler, and adjacent streets. Since its completion in September 2000, Erie-Ellington Homes has sparked renovation and improvement of area residences while providing much-needed affordable rental housing for city residents.
Located in Buffalo, New York, the Artspace Buffalo Lofts is an affordable housing project for artists that includes 60 live/work units and 9,795 square feet (910 sq m) of ground-floor commercial space. A renovated warehouse contains 36 of the units as well as the commercial space, the additional 24 residences are housed in six new buildings directly east of the rehabilitated structure. The commercial space provides a venue for residents and the greater Buffalo arts community to gather, network, and host events and showings.
Winslow Mews is a small-scale residential infill development sited on 1.5 acres in the town of Winslow on Bainbridge Island, Washington. This pedestrian-oriented community of single-family homes and duplexes features a densely urban design that highlights Pacific Northwest architectural influences. The development is within walking distance of Winslow Way (the town’s main street) and the ferry to Seattle.
