While we’re on the subject of affordable housing, let’s talk about sustainable design, for the two walk hand in hand. But first, let’s talk about American cheese.

Most would agree that American cheese, like toothpaste or tennis balls, is an affordable commodity. When we talk about affordable American cheese slices, we are talking about the relatively small amount of dollars required to acquire them at the American cheese store. The same holds true at the tennis ball store, and at the toothpaste store: the lower the price, the more affordable they are. Makes sense, right?

Of course it makes sense. And the same concept holds true with housing: The lower the initial price tag, the more affordable the house is. Right?

Enh-ah unh-ah! as we say in Kansas City, our pointer-fingers raised provocatively. Before you blindly tweet in the affirmative, take pause, for I have deceived you. Determining initial construction cost is only the first of many steps on the journey to a cool and affordable life in your cool and affordable house. If you really want to get to the bottom of affordability, you must keep walking, past the well-marked boundary of initial cost into the money-smelling terrain of longer-term operational costs. What you discover on this leg of the journey might very well cause you to backtrack a bit and reconsider your initial design decisions, because the efficiency (and ongoing affordability) of your house’s operation is a product of its construction.

With a basic understanding of how houses operate, you can make informed decisions regarding longer-term costs associated with the materials and systems you select. So, if it’s your desire to proceed boldly on the affordable journey we’ve been outlining, then put on your earth clogs (or other appropriately sustainable shoes) and walk with me.

Twelve Steps to Operational Affordability and Sustainability

Step 1: Use the most durable materials you can afford. This has been discussed in previous entries. Haven’t read them? Why not read them now? I’ll wait here. Or, for a quick summary: Don’t confuse the word “affordable” with the word “cheap.”

Step 2: Seek the Energy Star label. Use your eyes to view the efficiency rating of the appliances and HVAC units that will go into your house. Next, transfer the images you see to your brain, and use appropriate thoughts to help you understand that in the long run, cheap, low-efficiency units will extract significantly more money from your wallet than less-cheap Energy Star rated units.

Step 3: Go low-flow. By selecting readily available, low-flow plumbing fixtures and by adding off-the-shelf components like aerators and filters, you can easily reduce your water usage (and monthly bill) by 20 percent.

Step 4: Exteriorize. Exterior square feet are far less expensive to build and operate than interior square feet. Your affordable house should include habitable space outside, fitted out with smartly placed landscape elements to provide privacy and shade—and subsequent song birds, butterflies, and rainbows.

Step 5: Plant a garden. Plant edible plants, and eat them. Use the money you save to pay your water bill, or to buy delicious, easy-melting American cheese.

Step 6: Go Bronson. Plants don’t like sissy-water that comes from pipes. They are tough, like Charles Bronson. They want raw sky juice. Include rain barrels and rain gardens in your house design, and stay away from weak, non-native, water-junky plants like turf grass.

Step 7: Use free air. Understand where the breezes come from in your area, and design accordingly. Talk to old people about this; they know this stuff. Use windows, porches, and fans to get the air flowing. You might need to adapt your strategy from month to month, as the weather changes. Do that: your house is like a big swiss army knife, and you need to figure out how to use it.

Step 8: Drink good coffee. A thermos wisely uses basic thermal principles to keep the coffee the right temperature. Your house does the same thing, sort of. When it’s too hot or cold or humid to naturally ventilate, you’re going to have to condition the air. That’s the deal, so drink good coffee, buy a good thermos, and insulate your house to the highest level possible to keep all that expensive air the right temperature.

Step 9: Seal thy cracks. Pumping bucks to run your HVAC system more often to make up for leaky walls counteracts the effectiveness of your insulation, and is the single most unsatisfying way to spend money on planet earth. Use a breathable housewrap, and spray-foam insulation (an excellent crack-sealer) if you can afford it.

Step 10: Buy a calendar. Circle a couple days on it—one each at the beginning of the heating and cooling season. Take a few hours each year on those days to track cyclical repairs on your house. Proactively spend money on your house to keep it shipshape and efficient. Remember: Spending money wisely is fun. Making timely repairs increases your houses effectiveness and helps to maintain your investment. Deferring maintenance into the future is for carbon-footprint-tracking chumps.

Step 11: Buy a sweater. Wear it when it gets cold, and turn the thermostat down. When it gets hot, take the sweater off. When it gets real hot, walk around in your underwear. Do everything in your power to shift the boundaries of your comfort perception. Similar to the tough-ass plants described in Step 6, Bronson up and get on with your life.

Step 12: Buy a Mirror. Look at yourself in it. You are good looking, and you are in charge of your own actions. Realize you have the power to quit living like a resource-sucking hyper-mammal. Realize that you can raise your self-awareness, modify your behavior, and to live more affordably as a result. Give yourself a hug.

So that’s it. Twelve easy steps, and you’re on your way to thoughtful, long-term affordability. Combined with your previously acquired wisdom regarding the (small) size of your (future affordable) house, and the importance of quality materials, you should find yourself squarely on the right path.

Godspeed, my friend.

Guest writer Dan Maginn is a principal with El Dorado Inc., an architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the last in a four-part series titled “Square Feat,” which explored the myths and realities surrounding affordable housing. Read the previous entries here.

In my first two entries on affordable housing, we looked at how the size of your house dramatically affects its cost. In this entry, we’ll go a step further and take a look at the role quality plays in the affordability equation.

“Quality” is one of those words, like “moist” or “lotion,” that make me cringe a bit. I don’t like the way it looks on the page, and I don’t like the way it feels coming out of my mouth. Nevertheless, it’s a useful word to describe the general well-builtness of things—like fountain pens or scooters or affordable houses. So I’m just going to suck it up because you can’t understand affordable housing without understanding construction value, and you can’t understand construction value without understand quality.

There, I said it. And I’ll say it again: quality.

Eighty dollars-per-square-foot houses are made of different kinds of stuff than $160 a square foot houses. On the lower end, your contractor slaps cheaper materials together, squirts sealant goo in all the gaps, and then covers up  all the joints with trim. On the higher end, your contractor fits more expensive materials together with greater precision and care, and uses less goo. Most often, the most durable and aesthetically pleasing materials will cost you more.

It’s your house and it’s your money, so it’s up to you to determine the quality level that makes the most sense for the way you live: You control the goo. You will need some basic construction knowledge to be able do this, but it’s not that hard to figure out. Once you learn how to break down complex systems into their constituent parts, you will gain great insight into how much the house you really want will really cost.

It’s instructive to think of your future house as a series of connected systems, each of which has a wide range of material and labor options, and subsequent cost ramifications. Why is this so important? Consider lessons learned from the three little pigs. Of the three, only one of the little guys took the time to compare the value of different construction types. This wise pig understood that houses built from straw and sticks cost less than those built from bricks, but that they would not hold up as well when the wolf huffed and puffed. The other two pigs didn’t take the time to consider long-term value, and now they’re dead.

It’s worth it to try to understand the relationship between quality and cost. To get you started, I’ll take a quick look at four systems that come together to form an exterior wall: the exterior skin, the interior skin, the trim system and the stuff in the middle of it all.

Exterior skin. The exterior layer of your walls does a lot of work. Lessons from the pigs notwithstanding, natural materials (like brick) are off the table from the start. They cost far too much for your builder to acquire and get them slapped into place properly. T1-11 wood siding panels are off the table, too, because they suck. You see these plywoody panels in builder-grade housing all the time. Run away from them, and as you are running, consider using an open-joint rainscreen system. This system offers a breathable, weather-resistant underlayment. They have to be detailed and installed properly, but they allow for all kinds of craftsmanship-friendly modular skin materials, including corrugated metal, painted cement board (such as Hardi-plank) and cedar.

Interior skin. Back in the day, you could choose from all sorts of interior skin materials and still hit your budget. Plaster, wood wainscoting, stone tile—these were all affordable options.  Today, though, if your budget is under $150 a foot, your walls will most likely be finished with a ½-inch layer of drywall. Unless you have access to affordably-reclaimed wood planks or something, embrace drywall in all it’s dusty glory. Compared to other options, it’s cheap, easy to repair, and (best of all) easy to re-finish. Think of it as a blank canvas: Paint is even cheaper than drywall and shifting the colors of your rooms from time to time is an extremely affordable way to update your space.

Trim systems. As an architect with a tendency toward the modern, I have a complicated relationship with trim. I think it’s often overused—relied upon as a shortcut to the creation of “quality” space. In reality, though, lots of builder-grade trim just ends up looking cheap. Old school craftsman-style houses with lot of real, well-crafted trim are great, but they would be prohibitively expensive to pull off now.  If you try to approximate their appearance with particleboard extrusions squirted hither and yon, you are going to stink up the joint. I’d recommend spending your bucks instead on a good drywall job, and using a simple paint-grade 1-by-4 at the wall base and around doors and windows, with no trim at the wall-ceiling connection. If you want to save a few more bucks, you can use vinyl wall base in lieu of wood. The good folks at the Hotel San Jose in Austin did this (along with straightforward concrete floors) and it really works.

The middle stuff. Some components of the exterior wall system are invisible to the naked eye, but they have a huge impact on value. Don’t skimp on the non-glamorous infrastructural stuff that goes inside the middle of the wall—insulation, piping, electrical wiring and the like. Just don’t. If anything, consider the costs to upgrade to a higher level of performance (2-by-6 stud walls with R21 insulation, for instance). A well-insulated, draft-free house with a high-efficiency mechanical system is a great investment in the long run.

Get the picture? Four systems—and that’s just for the exterior walls. Flooring, lighting, windows, doors, appliances, plumbing fixtures, mechanical systems, landscaping: All of these are comprised of interlocking systems, each with their own value ranges. To know the difference between these systems is to know the difference between a house that costs $80 a square foot and one that costs $160 a foot. And this is a huge step. Once you know what your square foot cost range is, you can figure out how much the whole thing will cost.

Determining a realistic budget is easy, once you know your square feet and your cost per square foot range. Simply multiply the two together, et voilà. The resultant big-ass number with all the zeros at the end is your budget. (A friendly hint: Do this calculation at night, while you’re sitting down, preferably in an area that doesn’t have hurlable objects or beloved companion animals within easy reach.) Prepare yourself for a shock, but don’t fret too much. Although your number will most likely be discouraging, realize that it is not your enemy. It is your friend and it just wants to play. So take a deep breath and play.

One fun game to play is to put your big-ass friend on a diet. Make it smaller by cleverly reducing your square feet, and by consciously reducing your quality expectations a bit. Make it less big-ass by considering alternate construction pathways, like renovating an existing house, for instance, or looking into pre-fabricated alternatives. A realistic budget number has a way of focusing your creativity.

Next up: Final bloviations on maintenance and operational costs.

Guest writer Dan Maginn is a principal with El Dorado Inc., an architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the second in a four-part series titled “Square Feat,” which will explore the myths and realities surrounding affordable housing. Read the previous entries here.

How small is too small? For a two-bedroom, two-bath house, 100 square feet is too small. That’s 8 feet by 12 feet: the inside of a UPS truck, basically. Three hundred square feet? That’s ok for Ted Kaczynski, but it’s too small for you. Assuming you’re a relatively fit person in a moderately urban area who doesn’t mind bumping into your partner once in awhile, I think you’re going to need an absolute, bare minimum of around 900 square feet for your two-bedroom, two-bath house. Compared to the previous numbers, this sounds huge. But don’t get too excited.

In your mind (or for real, if you’re so inclined) go to a football field and stand in the end zone. Now, mentally (or physically) divide the end zone into five equal chunks. See the five chunks? Now pick your favorite of the five chunks, and stand in the middle of it. This is your house! You probably don’t want to go smaller than this.

(For those unfamiliar with the game of football, here’s an alternate method: Visit you local grocery store and cordon off five parking spaces with bright yellow crime scene tape. It’s basically the same shape.)

Where did this number come from? It’s the result of 10 painstaking minutes of deductive reasoning, based on 20 years of architectural practice. I didn’t just lick a frog and dream it up—it’s based on certain standard minimum human dimensions that correspond to certain standard human house-functions.

My wife and I could live in a 900 square foot house in a pinch. We currently don’t have the nickels to pull off building a new one, but if it meant we could actually shack up in a cool new joint of our own, we could live that small. How small is too small for you? If you channel your inner Descartes, you can figure it out in about an hour.

First, buy a nice tape measure and a Big Chief Tablet. Next, break up the home in which you currently live into its constituent parts, and jot them down. (Think “events” more than “rooms”: cooking, eating, hanging out, etc.) Pay attention to the way you currently live, and how it really feels. Then, measure the spaces and record if they feel too big or too small. Remember to include all the not-so-glamorous spaces in your house: utility rooms, storage areas, circulation space and the like. Next, think about how your life might change in the future—that will definitely affect the number.

Now start jotting down how big you’ll need the spaces to be in your new house. Tweak the size of each space as required, until it feels right for your future life. Carefully consider each one—as carefully as you’ve considered anything in your life up to this point. Jot down the numbers and then tally them up.

What’s your number? It might be 900 square feet, or it might be 1,200—but whatever the number is, it’s your number. Be simultaneously prudent and realistic as you perform this exercise. (Remember: too big = not good. Small = good. Too small = suck.)

My wife and I were able to slap a meaningful number together in about an hour, and it was actually kind of therapeutic and fun. We went into the process with an open mind, and worked through our future life, event by event. Sometimes we agreed immediately, and sometimes we had to meet in the middle. The fact that she’s six months pregnant made things particularly interesting. Here’s how we fared:

Cooking: We function just fine in a tight kitchen. For the most part, we anticipate each others’ moves and stay out of the way. With this in mind, we’d just need to reproduce what we have in our current house: a nice chunk of about 150 square feet to allow for basic food storage, prep and cooking.

Dining: We don’t need a formal dining room. We like to think of our kitchen / dining area as a single space: our own little one-table, 24-hour bistro. This works in our favor, smallness-wise, so we’re only going to need about 120 square feet glued onto our kitchen area to make it work.

Bedrooms: We need our future bedroom to be at least 130 square feet, with Junior’s room clocking in at about 110, for a total of 240 square feet. For many people this won’t quite cut it—they will want a more spacious master bedroom, and a larger closet. Good for them, but Keri and I don’t need it: we’re fit and we like each other and we smell good, for the most part.

Closets: I need a 16-square-foot closet, and Keri a bit more than that perhaps. Let’s say our total closet needs add up to 40 square feet.

Bathrooms: We don’t have any special needs like separate sinks or his and hers toilets—just a standard john, with a big sink and a nicely proportioned walk-in shower. At about 5-by-10, that’s 50 square feet. Maybe a bit smaller on bathroom number two, for a total of 90 square feet. Note that the same rules apply here as to the bedrooms—many people must absolutely have a more spacious area to poop, and who am I to take that privilege away from them?

Living: Aside from the kitchen and bedrooms, this is where we’ll spend most of our time: learning Chinese, teaching Junior about aardvarks, watching TV shows featuring attractive vampires. Two hundred square feet ought to do it.

Storage: Living small means you need to actively keep a handle on what stays and what goes. Adding all pantries, closets and storage areas together (and assuming we don’t have a basement in our affordable micro-house) Keri and I are going to need a minimum of about 80 square feet. We can divvy this up all over the house, in clever little nodes and built-ins.

Circulation: You need to consider some basic walking-around area to connect all these nice chunks. Adding everything up, and assuming our affordable house is a single-level affair, 50 square feet ought to be about right. Sloppy circulation sucks nickels like an aardvark sucks ants.

Mechanical/utility: This is the often overlooked and supremely un-fun area where your furnace and water heater and trash bags and all the spiders live. Keri and I can be pretty well organized, so let’s say 50 square feet.

And that’s it. Sleeping, cooking, eating, bathrooming, living, storing, walking around, and utilitizing. All told, our event list totals out at about 1,050 square feet. Perhaps your number is smaller. On the other hand, you may very well want to increase the size of your bedroom or kitchen, or add another bedroom—which would easily swing you in the other direction a few hundred feet.

I polled a few of my architect friends to hear what they had to say about affordable house sizes. Their numbers ranged from 900 to 1,400, with the average coming in at about 1,200. Obviously, there are no absolutes with regard to house size, but it’s interesting to get a better mental grip on one’s own square-footprint and compare it to others.

Understanding housing has as much to do with sociology, psychology and self-awareness as it does economics. Understanding your square foot number is the first step. The next step involves understanding the implications of quality, which affects the experience of your square footage. Once you have a sense of size, quality and initial cost, the next step involves understanding longer-term costs associated with the daily operation of your home, and its ongoing maintenance. Stay tuned.

Guest writer Dan Maginn is a principal with El Dorado Inc, an architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the second in a four-part series titled “Square Feat,” which will explore the myths and realities surrounding affordable housing. Read the previous entries here.

Guest writer Dan Maginn is a principal with el dorado inc, an architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri. This four part series, “Square Feat,” will explore the myths and realities surrounding affordable housing.

I’m a relatively smart guy. I have read the opening pages of numerous Thomas Pynchon books, and have a working vocabulary of over 60 words—nearly half of them polysyllabic. As an architect and a citizen of these United States, “affordable” and “housing” are two words that occupy my word-bag, and I use them all the time (i.e. “These cheeseburgers are affordable. Let’s eat them and talk about housing.”). They are solid, workhorse words—but when they get clumped together (i.e. “Let’s eat these cheeseburgers and talk about affordable housing”) things start to go south rapidly.

The topic is a favorite in numerous design magazines. Stories on groovily designed “affordable” houses abound—complete with sexy images of attractive albeit not-quite-affordable-looking people living in the houses. Like thousands of others, I’m drawn to these images. I’m interested because—someday—I really want to abandon the grumpy box of walls that I occupy with my wife and live in a cool new house. And we don’t have a ton of money.

So why are my Champion Brand boxer briefs so tightly knotted about this issue as it has played out in the media the last couple of years? They are knotted because the discussion is often based on misinformation or inconsistent assumptions. Armed with my discerning, distrusting eye (developed after 20 bitter years of architectural practice) I can usually see through the marketing spin to the naked, quivering truth of architectural things. Typically, in the stories I read or lectures that I attend, there is some cleverly obfuscated tidbit that clouds the issue. Because so many of us are seeking the Holy Grail—a cool house that you can actually afford to buy—we want to believe, and we find ourselves conveniently blocking out the pesky facts that might disprove the claims of affordability. Only with serious sleuthing can one discover the truth: that this affordable modular house over here was built with donated material and student labor; that that affordable factory-fabricated house over there is way smaller than the photo seems to suggest; and that this shiny pink kit house, way over here, with all the reporters clustered around it, requires an expensive foundation that isn’t mentioned in the brochure (among other disappointments).

We want so bad to believe that we can have it all—a cool design with lots of space, for not a lot of money. But we can’t have it all.

Without a clear understanding of all of the variables involved (size, quality, erection method, operational expenses and the like), the discussion can potentially mislead those interested in the topic, imbuing their receptive and well-meaning brains with inaccurate non-facts. A meaningful discussion of affordable housing steers away from clever misdirections and obfuscated tidbits and hones in on the grinding but necessary variables, in all their uptight glory. Although such a discussion is perhaps not quite as miraculous-feeling as some of the (sort of) affordable housing stories in the mags, it is nevertheless far less disappointing and abandoned-in-the-parking-lot-at-the-prom-feeling in the end.

To get a new conversation started, let’s look at size. Size is one of the most important variables in the affordability equation. It sounds obvious, but it is surprising how often this is left out of the conversation. When it comes to our cars, we seem to intuitively understand the relationship between size, quality, and cost. Shelter, however, causes many of us to suffer a cognitive lapse. (This lapse in understanding scale equates to a child’s perception of adult age. Back in the day, my 7-year-old niece confidently informed me that her father was more than 200 years old.) We want so bad to believe that we can have it all—a cool design with lots of space, for not a lot of money. But we can’t have it all. Size, quality, low cost: we can only have two of the three. Anyone that tells you differently is a clownish boob and they should be pushed and yelled at.

The first step to understanding affordability is to understand the relationship between size and cost. Architects think in terms of square feet. It’s part of our job to understand how our clients really live and to translate that all back into well-designed chunks of square feet. When the system is working well, our clients wind up with an appropriately sized space, and they are happy, and they pay us money for our efforts, and then we are happy.

What “appropriate” means in different cultures is a fascinating subject. For instance, I’m writing this at a small round table, in a coffee shop in Kansas City, Missouri. My body is physically taking up about three square feet. Given my social air-rights to the zone immediately around me, I’m currently leasing about 12 square feet, and that feels appropriate. As I look around the room, I see a number of other Kansas Citians engaged in various other functions within their square feet. I’ve got my chunk of square feet; the barrista has hers; so does the cashier. We all have our feet, and it feels about right.  Social air rights are tighter in dense urban areas. New Yorkers, Parisians, and Singaporians don’t mind bunching up a bit more. (When these people visit the midwest, they are wracked with a curious ennui owing to their perceived isolation.)

Square feet are important to understand, because each one—each precious chunk of material and air—is a commodity.

Square feet are important to understand, because each one—each precious chunk of material and air—is a commodity. Each square foot—be it a Kansas City square foot or a La Jolla square foot—costs real, cash-dollar money to construct, and that cost differs greatly depending on the nature and quality of the stuff in the foot. In my neck of the woods, a basic, one-off, architect-designed house with one bell and two whistles costs about $200 a foot to construct—and that’s pretty low compared to the rest of the country. A builder-grade house selected from a plan book, with limited options can cost between $90 and $150 a foot.

So, if you’re one of the thousands of everyday folks that doesn’t have a ton of dough, but still wants a cool house to live in, start by thinking hard about how big a house you actually, truly, absolutely, definitely need. (Think small. Small is huge. Small is good—it costs less than big.) Armed with your new-found appreciation of the wee, you can then start thinking about the next variables in the equation: the quality of the square feet themselves and how much it will cost to live in them and maintain them.