MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5, at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. For most people, public housing brings to mind drab apartment blocks clustered in poor neighborhoods, often poorly maintained. Many devolve into havens for drugs and crime. But a shift in the approach to affordable and low-income housing over the past few decades is slowing changing that.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIHousing for those who cannot afford market rent is now often integrated into mixed income developments, and many architects and planners are giving good design a higher priority. This means that these developments are more welcome in communities that once resisted them, and new trends, including green building initiatives, are making their mark on affordable housing projects.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIJoining us to explore this is our regular guest, Roger Lewis. He's an architect and the author of the "Shaping the City" column with The Washington Post. Roger is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park. Hi, Roger. Always a pleasure.

MR. ROGER LEWISGreetings. Nice to be here.

NNAMDIAlso in studio with us is Dana Bourland, vice president of Green Initiatives for Enterprise Community Partners, Incorporated, an organization that helps finance affordable housing. Dana Bourland, thank you for joining us.

MS. DANA BOURLANDWell, thank you.

NNAMDIAnd we invite you to join the conversation. Call us at 800-433-8850. Do you think good design is important in low-income housing, or do you see it as a luxury? 800-433-8850. You can call also send email to kojo@wamu.org, send us a tweet, @kojoshow, or simply go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation there. Roger, what are we talking about when we talk about affordable, low-income and public housing?

LEWISWell, public housing has almost dropped out of vocabulary in the last 25 years. But I think, in a nutshell, when we talk about affordable housing, we're talking about housing that is affordable to people who can't buy or rent, pay the normal costs, or a rental involved in housing that's privately financed, and it's built through conventional financing, conventional construction means.

LEWISSo what I've always said over and over again in talking about this subject is, in most cases, to make housing affordable, some form of subsidy is involved, which may be through the land, the cost of the land being less than market value or through direct subsidy, either to the developer or to the tenant or buyers. So that -- the big change of now is that there are a lot more people today in our economic circumstances concerned about affordability than there were when "public housing programs" were first launched after -- particularly after World War II.

NNAMDIWe wanted to get a sense of how thinking about low-income and affordable housing has evolved. What was the idea when public housing projects, as they call them, were first being built?

LEWISWell, there were two, I think -- two major motives. One was that there were parts of cities that the -- both political community and citizens in general looked at and said, you know, these are really below standard. They're unsafe, crime-infested. Let's get rid of them. Let's clear them and build new, perhaps affordable, housing. In many cases, the housing that replaced these parts of cities that were demolished were not necessarily affordable.

LEWISSo there was that motive, and then, of course, there was the motive that there was a segment of the population whose incomes were not sufficient to enable them to go into the market and rent or buy a house. And so there was a social, if you will -- an altruistic motive that was coupled with the motive to want to clean up parts of cities that drove the creation of programs to build "public housing." Public housing was always aimed at people who were a little bit above the poverty line but were having a hard time making ends meet.

NNAMDIDana, and, at one time, design for low-income housing meant how many units can you fit into the building. Has that changed?

BOURLANDIt has. It's completely changed. You know, we're rethinking the way that we're delivering housing. And to Roger's point, I think public housing, you know, 40 years ago or so was something that was removed from the fabric of a lot of our communities. And there were dead-end streets and closed roads and concentration of people who all were making about the same income, really low incomes.

BOURLANDAnd so we are definitely rethinking housing. It's not just how many units can you sort of cram into any given building envelope on any given parcel. It's really how do you weave housing back into the fabric of a neighborhood so that it works for people that are already living there, people that need to live there, make it affordable but make it resilient and healthy and housing that's going to be an attribute to the community?

NNAMDIAgain, the number to call is 800-433-8850. You can also send us email to kojo@wamu.org. Would you welcome affordable housing in your neighborhood? Why or why not? 800-433-8850 is the number to call. Ideas about where you put low-income housing has also changed. How about specifically in our region? What's the thinking in terms of where affordable housing is built?

BOURLANDYes. Specifically, in this region, you know, Enterprise is focused on finding places where we can locate housing where it's not just the housing is affordable, but the overall affordability of living there works for people with low incomes. So we're looking to provide housing next to or close within proximity to different modes of transportation. You know, a lot of low-income households are spending 70 percent of their income just for their rent and their transportation costs.

BOURLANDSo it's -- particularly in the D.C. sort of metro region, we really care about transit-oriented development and placing housing near modes of transportation.

NNAMDIAnd affordable means housing costs not exceeding 30 percent of a household's gross income. We're having a conversation here on designing affordable housing. We're talking with Roger Lewis, architect and author of the "Shaping the City" column with The Washington Post and professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park, and Dana Bourland, vice president of Green Initiative for Enterprise Community Partners, Incorporated, which helps finance affordable housing.

NNAMDIAgain, we're taking your calls at 800-433-8850. Roger, the need for affordable housing is greater than ever, even though it would appear that the amount of affordable housing is declining in many places.

LEWISYeah, that's one of the dilemmas. It's sort of a paradox. There had been -- there was a lot of housing built in the '50s and '60s, even in the '70s. But in that era, many projects were sponsored by either nonprofits or limited dividend developers pursuant to contracts often with HUD or state housing agencies. And there was -- it reached a point where a lot of these owners, when these contracts came to an end or when they needed to be renewed, opted not to renew the contracts and actually converted housing that had been low-income housing -- converted into market-rate housing.

LEWISThey could invest a little, clean up the place, upgrade the kitchens and bathrooms and market these for an amount of money that the previous tenants or the previous occupants could not afford. So there was a -- there has been a decline, if you will, in the inventory or the supply of much housing, particularly in places like New York and even here in Washington and, to some extent, other cities.

LEWISAt the -- the other thing that has exacerbated the supply is that after -- in the 1980s, the federal government basically shut down a huge number of the programs that helped finance affordable housing. I mean, I lay the blame at the feet, to some extent, of Ronald Reagan. I mean, Reagan, he -- actually, the Reagan administration actually wanted to get rid of HUD, wanted to get rid of these programs. So those forces have moved in the direction of constraining or reducing the supply of affordable housing.

LEWISWhat it meant is that the states and localities, the states and cities and counties had to step in and do more to try and generate -- find ways to subsidize and promote the building of affordable housing or the conversion of other housing to affordability.

NNAMDIYou remind me that the low profile of HUD during the Reagan administration was so significant that the secretary of housing was known as silent Sam Pierce.

LEWISThat's right. Your memory...

NNAMDIAnd President Reagan once met him and introduced him as, hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing? Even his own boss didn't remember who he was. But it seems that numbers would indicate that, even when housing is converted from affordable to mixed income, in a lot of cases, the total number of affordable units drops.

LEWISWell, again, it depends on whether we're talking about totally new construction. For example, in Montgomery County, if a developer is building a new housing project today, under the moderately priced dwelling unit legislation in that county, a certain percentage of those units have to be priced to be affordable by -- what is it? -- 70 percent medium income. Before that, the developers didn't have to do anything.

LEWISSo -- and D.C. has a moderately-priced or a below-market price stipulation that it puts on developers. That's in new projects. The big challenge, though, is most of our housing inventory exists already. There's a whole lot of stuff out there. And that -- within that collection of units, those millions of units, I think, generally more and more of them have become unaffordable, or they've become unlivable. Strangely enough, in recent years, banks are tearing down houses because no one can buy them.

NNAMDIDana?

BOURLANDYeah, Kojo, I would actually add to that, Roger, that through design and -- you know, I think it's terrific that the secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, is an architect, really understands design, has infused that into the department.

BOURLANDAnd what we're seeing with a lot of housing, particularly that housing that has some public subsidy in it, through great design, through excellent design, we can actually provide even more numbers of homes for people with low incomes, at the same time preserve the existing housing stock, and it can be done very elegantly and in a way that the community is involved and having a stake in the design of that development.

BOURLANDAnd particularly in D.C., we're seeing our own, you know, work in D.C. with our partners at the National Housing Trust preserving units of housing while we're also providing a number of new units at the same time. So design allows us to do both, to preserve housing, improve upon it and still meet the need of the growing demand that we have in this country for housing.

NNAMDIOn to the telephones, we'll start with Chris in Montgomery Village, Md. Chris, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

CHRISYes. Hi. Thanks for taking my call, Kojo. I just want to chime in today on today's topic, and there's two points I want to discuss really quickly and briefly. The first is that I'm a resident of Montgomery County, actually, Montgomery Village to be exact. And we've recently had an explosion of low-income housing individuals in our area. When I purchased my home, I was at one value, of course. And then, you know, now, we have a mixture of incomes in the area. So things have kind of changed. But the point I'm trying to make is that I totally agree with what your guests are saying.

CHRISI went to Philadelphia the last past weekend and saw a low-income housing development that is in Philadelphia downtown, and I couldn't even tell. So putting quality into the work and design, really using an approach regarding architecture and high quality in standards, it does two things. Number one, it does give community involvement, and it also brings a sense of, you know -- so the community feels that my -- there's no depreciation in my value of what I put into my home and the surrounding areas.

CHRISAnd number two is that, I think, it also can start to spur a change in the mindset of the individuals who are on the assistant living. The -- I mean, the low-income recipient -- housing recipient. I think it really makes...

NNAMDIThat Section 8 housing vouchers is what a lot of people get. Go ahead.

CHRISPardon me, sir?

NNAMDISection 8 housing vouchers is what a lot of low-income people get.

CHRISThere you go, exactly, Section 8 housing vouchers. Thank you very much. And so I'm just saying that I think that that quality is very important in the architecture and that also having the sense of community is also very paramount and key in making sure that we establish...

NNAMDIChris, allow me to have Roger Lewis talk a little bit about not only what you asked about, but the HOPE VI federal program and how it focuses on public housing and improving it. It would appear in ways that Chris apparently noticed maybe in Philadelphia.

LEWISWell, I think that what has happened is that in view of the sort of negative trends I alluded to earlier about the constraint of inventory, the constraint of supply, what Dana is pointing out and what he's talking about are emblematic of the -- what I think of is the really creative and highly motivated forces that are, in fact, helping to produce affordable housing, which otherwise wouldn't exist.

LEWISHOPE VI, for example, was -- is a program of HUD that was created to replace many dysfunctional public housing projects that everybody agree -- there was unanimity that these places that didn't work, that they had all kinds of problems that -- some which were design-related and some which were sociological problems. So HOPE VI said, okay, let's take -- let's get rid of these things that aren't working, that we know everyone agrees have failed or have problems. But we also we need to replace these with housing that doesn't bring out -- about the same problems.

LEWISAnd what it resulted in is a number of projects around the country that have been taken down and replaced by housing that has -- I think Dana described them, as I've designed them -- and I've designed a lot of affordable housing projects -- that are -- look completely different than the stereotypical public housing project. I mean, I think part of the problem is the stigma. There's an immediate image that comes conjured up in minds of many people of what public housing is. And what do they envision?

LEWISEnvision slabs rising 15, 20 stories in the air with vast, empty, un-policed, problematic spaces in between, with no grass growing. I mean, I -- the new -- the HOPE VI projects have generated communities and neighborhoods that are -- when you look at them, you don't think, there's another public housing project. They look like places that any of us wouldn't mind living and that are appropriately landscaped, that are -- where the density, even though they're not 20-story buildings that -- it's possible to achieve the same densities that you might expect with mid- and high-rise buildings.

LEWISWe ought to talk later about density.

NNAMDIYes.

LEWISSo I think the point is that, by doing -- by designing these communities -- these housing projects, I should say -- well or, even more so, integrating them with market rate housing, which is one of the other things that we're doing a lot more effectively, you can make it possible for the community not only to be part of the process -- you need community support. We haven't talked enough about how important it is for a community to be supportive of the notion of that community supplying and, in fact, subsidizing affordable housing.

NNAMDIAnd in case you're having trouble creating a mental picture of what we're talking about, there are visual photos available at our website, kojoshow.org. You can see what's going on at the Capper project in Southeast Washington. You can also see photos of three projects by Enterprise Community Partners. So here now is Dana Bourland.

BOURLANDYeah, it's music to my ears that the caller had that experience in Philadelphia because it's really -- that's what we're after. And I think for a long time, affordable housing in particular was a product. You know, sort of let's just get a number of apartment or homes built and call it a day. But it's not a product. It's a process. It's something that involves, and absolutely has to involve, both the people that need housing as well as the people living in the communities where we will be building or preserving housing.

BOURLANDAnd the terrific thing that's happening right now at HUD is that they're using their public investment to say, we want a better asset. We want, you know, anyone taking advantage of our public subsidy to use that to produce housing that is going to be energy-efficient. It's going to conserve water that's going to be healthy and that will be operated and maintained in a way that will prepare it for a much a longer life cycle. And so we're not only, you know, producing excellent design.

BOURLANDWe're producing housing that -- because we're responding to the needs of low-income communities, we're providing a much better housing experience, one that has playgrounds and community centers and places for folks to interact. And it's green at the same time, which is tremendous. You know, here in the District, it's a requirement that if you build housing that has public subsidy, then you must meet Enterprise's Green Communities' criteria. And Enterprise Homes is working on a new development that's coming out of the ground right now.

BOURLANDYou can go see (word?) townhomes.com and take a look. It's a place any of us would be proud to live. And it just so happens that it's also affordable for folks that have really low incomes, workers and people who, you know, just need a great place to live in a community that allows them to get around.

NNAMDIGo to take a short break. When we come back, we will continue this conversation on designing affordable housing. If you've got questions, go to our website, kojoshow.org. Ask a question or you can make a comment there. Send us email to kojo@wamu.org or a tweet, @kojoshow. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. We're talking about designing affordable housing with Dana Bourland, vice president of Green Initiatives for Enterprise Community Partners, which helps finance affordable housing, Enterprise Community Partners, Incorporated. Also with us, Roger Lewis, architect and author of the "Shaping the City" column with The Washington Post and professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland College Park.

NNAMDIHave a lot of callers on the line, so we'll try as best as possible to get to your calls. We'll start with Kim in Ashburn, Va. Kim, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

KIMHi. This is Kim. I came from foreign country. I start my real estate 2003. And I feel sorry for all the American have to pay a lot of money right now to get a house. I feel that the builder that get their long entire goal is not the expenses. When they build a house, they should make it, like, reasonable price to sell to everybody. Cannot create a society, like, high-end society, low-income society, medium-income society. That is not -- it's not American people always see in the papers, say, equal housing opportunity. That is no equal in the society.

KIMA builder get the rent. They can set out whatever price they want to. And they set at a higher price, thus higher people income will live in their area. If you don't allow the townhouse, they then give you a lot of land. They build a -- both the two-car garage, so if no land for you, how much, but you have to pay a lot of money. For me, I feel like American people should stick together. If you don't have to buy house, you can stay with your parents. Stay with the parents.

NNAMDIYou're raising a lot of social and cultural questions here. But the one I'm going to hone in on, Roger, seems to be Kim's suggestion that we have an orientation to favoring larger and more expensive houses, and that if we spent more time building affordable housing, which brings me to an issue you want to raise, whether for owning or renting, we'd be in a lot better place.

LEWISWell, Kim, for you and the other listeners, as an architect who's designed a lot of housing and actually developed some, there are a whole lot of pressures on the development on what's on the housing that's developed in new projects. There are zoning laws that regulate density and typology of housing. I mean, you can build -- there are places that are -- that, by law, you have to build detached, single family houses and other places that are zoned for multi-unit higher-density projects.

LEWISAnd in those cases, the land value is determined by the zoning. And then you have the market pressures and opportunities. Generally speaking, a builder -- developers, who are profit-making developers, in a market that's healthy, will -- are simply making more money by building more square footage and selling it to people who can afford it. And that is part of the problem in that we have, in many communities, places where we might like to build affordable housing, where these forces I've alluded to get in the way.

LEWISSo part of the -- I think, part of what you're talking about gets around to public policy issues, such as zoning laws, or, you know, can we think about having governments and citizens who vote for the people -- who are politic officials, who might rethink how land regulation is enacted and enforced that might make it a little more feasible for developers who are still in the game to make a profit, to actually be motivated, be incentivized to build housing that is available to people of all income levels.

LEWISI mean, right now, there are still many communities in the United States where there -- where it's very difficult to actually -- even if you want to, to build a "affordable" housing unit.

NNAMDIKim, thank you very much for your call. Dana, I'd like to turn another issue with you, because one major change now is that most affordable housing finds itself in mixed income developments. How are these projects funded? And has that changed a lot over the past several decades? How would a typical project a few decades ago have been funded versus today?

BOURLANDYeah. I think, you know, the difference, maybe, today is, just to get affordable housing financed, it takes a lot of sources. And each source has some requirements to it typically. And, you know, I think the major driver, still, for a lot of the multi-family development in this country is still the low income housing tax credit. And I think states have really taken advantage of allocating those credits to developers in a way to sort of influence the kind of development they want.

BOURLANDAnd so states are putting in stipulations within a qualified allocation plan that a developer can either become more competitive, or it's just threshold in that state to provide mixed use or -- and mixed income, definitely, types of development. And so that's a primary driver, Kojo, right now.

NNAMDISo, before, it used to be, I guess, mostly federal money. Now, it's local, federal, state and private money being cobbled together to do these projects?

BOURLANDExactly.

NNAMDIAnother call now, Ray in Centreville, Va. Ray, your turn.

RAYHi, Kojo. Thank you for taking my call. I just had an idea -- and I recall that my wife's grandmother lived in England, and after World War II, they had to live in public housing. And instead of having them pay continually a rent or subsidized housing cost to a place to live -- it was a building, and I was actually in the building. It was built like a home, smaller like it's kind of like a condo. And instead of doing -- instead of paying forever, what they did was they rented, and they actually owned it at the end.

RAYSo I can't see how this wasn't encouraged -- the growth, just the economic growth. Okay. So the stimulus is our government build it, but then we give these homes, the availability to these beautiful homes that the architect was speaking about, to people that can afford them under low-cost housing, yet rent them to own. Then you lose your running cost over time, and they have the pride of homeownership.

NNAMDIRenting with the option to own, not necessarily a very popular option in these parts, is it, Dana?

BOURLANDYou don't hear about it too much, Kojo. But it is happening here in the United States, certainly. In places like Cleveland, there are very strong lease-to-own programs. And so I think, you know -- I think the bigger question is what kind of housing balance do we have in this country right now? And do we have the right choices, I mean, the right opportunities to choose the kind of housing that we need?

BOURLANDAnd, for some of us, we need a place to rent because we need to maybe be mobile or we're not quite sure, you know, where we're going to be, and we need to take advantage of job opportunities. And maybe we, you know -- other -- those of us, you know, need a place that we can start building equity and own our own home. So I think it's -- the bigger question here is, you know, the housing balance. And I would say, and probably enterprise would say, that it's out of balance right now in terms of opportunities to rent versus opportunities to purchase.

NNAMDIIn religious terms, culturally, Roger, we tend to worship at the altar of ownership.

LEWISYes, I think...

NNAMDIAnd even though I've always said, one day I see a resident manager in my future, I probably worship at that altar also. But go ahead.

LEWISWell, as you and I have discussed before -- and I've written several times about this in The Post. I mean, I think there continues to be in this culture, American culture, a stigma vis-à-vis rental. If you don't own your house or your apartment, if you're a renter, somehow that means you're still a work in progress. I think that we do need to de-stigmatize rental. I think we do -- I think there are a lot of people in this country, particularly now, for whom rental is the right way to house themselves.

LEWISI think that there a lot of advantages to rental. You -- Dana alluded to one of them: people move quite frequently. And I think that it would help -- I think we could solve more of the problem if people were more willing to, say, listen, I can get along just fine in life as -- renting versus ownership. Now, of course, there's been a lot of recent changes in -- by developers in projects that have been started in the last few years, where they've converted -- they've decided to rent instead of sell condo apartments because the -- again, marketing conditions were working against them.

LEWISThe financing wasn't available. The credit standards couldn't be met for loans. And so what do they do? They said, okay, we'll rent this to you. I think the notion of a kind of installment purchase, I mean, leasing with an option to buy is a form of installment purchasing that we probably should be doing a lot more of. And I don't know what it's going to take to make that happen, but...

NNAMDIDana, one perpetual issue is getting communities to accept low-income housing. Here is Michelle in Alexandria, Va. Michelle, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MICHELLEKojo, thanks for taking my call. I live in Alexandria in the former warehouse district there at Alexandria, where there's a number of redevelopment properties happening, and also a significant number of Section 8 housing. You may have noticed in the news last -- this past week on Monday night, there was actually a homicide at the Andrew Adkins public housing area. A 40-year-old man lost his life in a drive-by shooting, and that was not the first homicide that has taken place in that housing development.

MICHELLESo the real crime in that area is very high, as well the nuisance crime: litter, parties late at night, that sort of thing. Alexandria was one of the kind of pioneers, I think, in the area of integrating mixed housing and low-income housing with market-rate housing in the Chatham Square area. And that has gone reasonably well. I think they learned some lessons there. But my question, really, is, how do interested parties, concerned citizens, groups, governments, what not, motivate housing authority agencies, like ARHA, Alexandria Housing Authority Agency, to move these properties?

MICHELLEThe property that I'm speaking of is actually one block away from the Braddock Road Metro. I would submit that that's one of the most valuable properties in the entire D.C. metro area. And it's absolutely filled with Section 8 housing. ARHA's response to that would be, well, we have several, 5-, 6-, 7-bedroom units in that particular area, so they don't feel like they can, you know, redevelop that area, that particular site because they would lose the ability to put families of 7, 8, 10 in the area.

NNAMDISo you're suggesting that that should me a mixed-income development rather than a low-income housing development?

MICHELLEAbsolutely.

NNAMDIDana, you were formerly with the Maryland Department of Planning, and you saw the NIMBYism, I guess, close up. Care to comment on what Michelle is talking about?

BOURLANDI do care to comment, Kojo. You know, not in my backyard, NIMBYism is prevalent across the country and certainly here in the state of Maryland and in Virginia and D.C. It doesn't cease in any community, really, because, I think, we get comfortable with our communities, and the prospect of change is uncomfortable to us. And so we often don't want what we don't know about in our communities. And I think, you know, even at the Maryland Department of Planning, but, really, within Enterprise, what I've seen as sort of an answer, a solution to that is providing good examples.

BOURLANDSo getting in front of the Housing Redevelopment Authority and showing examples right here in the region, in other parts of the country -- you know, we have been involved in New Orleans with Lafitte, a large redevelopment of 27 acres.

BOURLANDAnd I think there are so many wonderful examples across the country right now that we can share more quickly with redevelopment authorities, housing authorities, so that when that next opportunity comes around to rethink existing housing, we have the best of what we know works to provide mixed income opportunities and redevelop in a way that is greener, is healthier and more resilient.

BOURLANDAnd so, you know, I would offer that to the caller, is -- you know, come to our website, Enterprise Community Partners, enterprisecommunity.org or to Roger Lewis' columns and find good examples. And let's get that in front of the housing authority.

NNAMDIAnd you will find links to both at our website, kojoshow.org. We have to take a short break. When we come back, a focus on design as we talk about affordable housing. If you've called, stay on the line. We'll try to get to your call. If the lines are filled, as they seem to be, go to our website kojoshow.org. Or send us a tweet, @kojoshow, or email to kojo@wamu.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIJoining us in the studio, Roger Lewis, architect and author of the "Shaping the City" column with the Washington Post. He's also professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park. He joins us with Dana Bourland, vice president of Green Initiatives for Enterprise Community Partners Incorporated, an organization that helps finance affordable housing, to discuss designing affordable housing. Roger, many communities have an image of what affordable housing looks like, an image that might not be accurate any longer. How can good design help to get a project accepted?

LEWISWell, referencing the previous call from Michelle in Alexandria, there are public housing projects, blocks over there that, as soon as you arrive in that neighborhood, you know you're in the realm of public housing. Public -- let's not even use the word public housing. I mean, I think that affordable housing is what we ought to talk about, or even workforce housing. A lot of people are using the term workforce housing because we're trying to house policemen and firemen and teachers and architects and people who work for radio stations.

LEWISI mean, the -- because the cost of so much housing in places like Washington has gotten to be pretty unaffordable. So what makes the most sense is to design the housing so, A, it becomes integrated visually, functionally in the fabric of a community that's larger than simply the locus of those housing units.

LEWISAnd part of this is done -- sometimes you do it by building a market-rate project in which a percentage of the units are subsidized and affordable, or in the case -- in some cases, if you're building 80 units that are to be all affordable, you can design those -- particularly, if you're committed to sustainability, you can design those, so, again, it looks like part of the regular fabric of the community. And it doesn't invite this feeling of, oh, here's the public housing project, and, in fact, it further motivates the people who live there not to drop Styrofoam cups on the sidewalk.

NNAMDIDana, you focus on green initiatives in affordable housing, which sounds great. We know that, in the long run, green and sustainable design can be cheaper. But doesn't it cost more in the short run?

BOURLANDIt really doesn't have to, Kojo. What we've been studying at Enterprise is exactly that -- you know, what does it cost to meet Enterprise's Green Communities criteria, which is a national framework, the first national framework for thinking about green affordable housing? And what we found in development after development is that the total development costs may be 1 to 2 percent additional to meet our criteria. But after a developer sort of goes through that process once, those costs come down almost immediately.

BOURLANDAnd we have yet to see a developer who committed to doing one green building, not do a second or a third. And the way that we've seen -- to keep the cost down and still build a green building is by engaging an integrative design.

BOURLANDSo really taking that time out in the beginning to sort of figure out what kind of building you want and what are the energy targets, what are the water targets, and how is that building going to fit in to the fabric of the community and what can you take advantage of in terms of passive heating and cooling and -- so, really, the hope of the future, in my mind, is using integrative design each and every time, so it just becomes a seamless process of how we're rethinking the way we're delivering housing in this country.

NNAMDIAnd the planning is what's really important in looking at the cost, is it not, Roger?

LEWISWell, let me be specific about the scales of sustainability. You know, you can make their strategies, big moves you make, like saving existing buildings. When you save an existing building, all the invested energy and all the invested money is saved, so...

NNAMDI'Cause you're not building a new building.

LEWISYou're not building a new building. So, for example, recycling, adaptively reusing buildings, whether it's housing or anything else -- you can build a housing in almost anything -- is one of the things we do that is a very green move. Then density -- we have to bring up the D word -- density is one of the things that also contributes to being greener.

LEWISThat is to say, you get -- if you can get more units and more population sharing foundations, sharing walls, sharing roofs, sharing community facilities as opposed to sprawling out into the hinterlands and building far more roads -- I mean, I think most of the listeners probably understand this that that in itself, again, is a big strategic move that makes our community, our environment, more sustainable.

LEWISAnd then as Dana's pointed out, once you -- when you finally get into the building and the unit, then there's a whole other level, another scale of moves that can be made that make the unit not only more livable, but more sustainable, less energy consumption, more comfortable. And whether it's energy-efficient appliances or putting in decent windows that -- I mean, windows are one of the things, for example, that can add a little to your front-end cost, but over the -- over time, save money, save energy.

NNAMDIWell, I'm glad you mentioned the hinterlands. You might have also mentioned the holler because here is Moises (sp?) in Washington, D.C. to raise that issue. Moises, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MOISESThank you for taking my call. I wanted to add another dimension to the discussion of affordable housing, and that's rural areas and small towns. Clearly, with a quarter of our population living in those areas, it's important not to ignore them. Rural areas have about not just a quarter of our population, but higher rates of poverty. It's also more difficult to get credit in rural communities.

MOISESSo the challenges are certainly different. Things like density -- which we just spoke about -- things like scale provide additional challenges. So any discussion about affordable housing and greening has to take into account that there are parts of the country where not all the ideas necessarily apply, and we have to look at them as unique areas with unique needs. And we should not ignore that significant part of the population.

NNAMDIDana?

BOURLANDCompletely agree with the caller. And, again, I think, sometimes, when we talk about green affordable housing or just green building generally, immediately we think of these iconic green buildings in urban areas. But what we're talking about it on price is, indeed, you know, making sure that we have housing affordable to all low-income Americans in every community and have a big emphasis of our work in rural parts of America, as well as we have sustainable native communities collaborative looking at how to provide housing in an authentic way for those living on tribal lands.

BOURLANDAnd so it's -- yeah, definitely, we have to think about it slightly differently. And, again, that's the hallmark of green building, is to say, okay, we're in this rural area. This is how people need to get around. This is, you know, the type of land and soils that we have. And what can we do on this particular parcel to offer housing that will be affordable and resilient for time to come?

NNAMDII think we have a first-person testimony here. Moises, thank you for your call. Here is Anne in Derwood, Md. Anne, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ANNEHi, Kojo, I actually work in Derwood. I live in Northern Frederick County, and I'm a Section 8 recipient myself. I was kind of set off. In the beginning, there was a question of, do people -- do low-income people even deserve good design? And I think…

NNAMDIYes. That was a prompt that I posted, yes.

ANNEYeah, it kind of set me off. I have an AA, and, because of family needs, I can't go back to work and get my bachelor's degree. So until my income changes, I'm going to need help from Section 8. But to think that I don't deserve good design or I don't deserve green design, people in Section 8 don't have as much income for, say, things like electric and A/C and stuff like that. And so I called the electric company, and I had them come out and do one of those things from top to bottom on the townhouse that I rent.

ANNEAnd I was willing to put time and energy and money into making my home more green, even though I'm Section 8, because I value my home. Just because the government helps me to pay for it doesn't mean that I don't value it and that I don't deserve good design.

NNAMDIThank you very much. That was the response I was looking for, as a matter of fact...

ANNEThank you.

NNAMDI...when I raised that question. Anne, thank you for your call.

ANNEAll right.

NNAMDIWe got a comment from our website, though. "If you build this attractive affordable housing, what is to keep it from being turned over -- just as it happened in the past -- and later sold to more upscale customers?"

BOURLANDYeah. It's a great question, and Roger got at that a little bit earlier. You know, we do want to preserve the affordability of housing for years to come. And a lot of the public financing, and even some of the private financing that goes to developing housing that's affordable, has stipulations in it to require that it remain affordable for 40 years, oftentimes. And so, you know, that's one method of addressing that concern.

NNAMDIHere is John in Germantown, Md. John, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOHNThank you for taking my call, Kojo. I'm glad to hear some rural emphasis here. But my question, really, is to the -- to Roger and Dana, concerning good interior design and quality of material, encouraging both the preservation of the unit by the occupant and having the -- lowering, actually, the long-term maintenance cost to the owner. I'll take my answer off the air.

NNAMDIRoger?

LEWISWell, I -- I've -- I should disclose that I've designed affordable housing in rural settings. I've done, in particular, some projects we're very proud of on the Eastern Shore in Chestertown and a number of the other Eastern Shore counties. And the -- they were very challenging because the budgets to these were HUD Section 202 or Section 8 projects, which in -- where the budget is very constrained. And to try and achieve all of the things we're talking about with these constrained capital budgets is not easy.

LEWISThe -- but I think we've succeeded. I'm proud of what my firm has done. We've succeeded, actually, in doing award-winning low-income housing in rural settings by really doing what we've been talking about the whole hour, which is being very careful about where we invest the money. You know, what -- you know, for example, we -- it was -- we -- these units are air-conditioned. I mean, they have heat pumps so that they -- for example, that -- now, this is -- this has been 20 years. But they -- a heat pump can both heat and cool a unit.

LEWISWe have -- we did a number of things, installing appliances and doing the finish -- the windows and doors and so forth so that they would hold up. There's some things we didn't spend money on. We did not -- there's no granite or marble in these units. I think that the -- I think a lot of what needs to happen is that we architects, who design this stuff, now have a much better knowledge of what we need to do and to make this happen and to satisfy your needs.

NNAMDIThe time goes so quickly when you're having a discussion like this, but I'm afraid it's gone. Roger Lewis is an architect and the author of the Shaping the City column with The Washington Post. He's also professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland in College Park. Roger, thank you for joining us.

LEWISThank you.

NNAMDIDana Bourland is the vice president of Green Initiatives for Enterprise Community Partners Incorporated, an organization that helps finance affordable housing. Dana Bourland, thank you for joining us.

BOURLANDThank you, Kojo. Pleasure.

NNAMDIAnd thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.