What Happened to Affordability in Housing?

I met Michael Pyatok in December 2025 in Oakland, over a bowl of ramen not far from his office. I had known his work for years, but our conversation that day returned to a theme he has raised often in lectures and discussions: the origins of his thinking in the study—and personal experience—of the historic New York Tenement of New York City.

Mike Pyatok spoke about tenement life with a mix of realism and nostalgia. The overcrowding and poor sanitation of those buildings are well documented, and he never romanticizes them. But he often points to the urban intelligence embedded in their form: dense yet walkable blocks, buildings that clearly define the street, and the close relationship between stoops, sidewalks, and daily social life. All the much-needed amenities, from dry cleaners to daycare, were within a short walk. These spatial conditions produced something that many later housing models failed to achieve—strong neighborhood networks and an active public realm. By contrast, the isolated superblocks and towers that dominated postwar public housing frequently dissolved the everyday interactions that make urban communities function.

Working with Mike over several years reinforced a principle that runs quietly but firmly through his work: affordability does not come from the absence of design thinking. If anything, it requires more discipline. Clear plans, rational building forms, and a careful relationship between private units and shared spaces do not inherently increase cost. What determines affordability are more pragmatic decisions—straightforward structural systems, durable but simple materials, and restraint in the number of costly amenities that projects accumulate over time.

In practice, the most significant cost drivers are rarely architectural ideas. They are underground parking structures, overly complex façades, specialized building assemblies, and amenity packages that extend well beyond what is necessary for dignified living. Mike has long demonstrated that thoughtful architecture can coexist with strict financial limits. In that sense, affordability does not emerge from abandoning design philosophy; it emerges from calibrating it carefully to material simplicity and essential program.

Over the past two decades, however, the landscape of affordable housing has shifted. Many cities now require affordable units to be integrated into market-rate developments as part of planning approvals or inclusionary housing policies. These mixed-income projects have, in many cases, improved the physical conditions of subsidized units. Affordable apartments are often placed within the same buildings as market-rate units, sharing similar access to light, circulation, and common spaces.

Yet it is important to recognize that this elevation in design and amenity standards is rarely mandated directly by affordability policies themselves. Municipal requirements typically address income thresholds, unit counts, and long-term affordability controls. They do not require expanded amenity packages or heightened architectural expression. In many cases, these additions reflect developer strategy and market positioning rather than a direct obligation of the affordability mandate.

The result is a subtle shift in expectations. Affordable housing today is increasingly evaluated against the standards of market-rate residential development. While this integration has produced many positive outcomes, it has also blurred the distinction between what is necessary for livable housing and what is added to compete within a consumer-oriented housing market.

If affordability is to remain meaningful, the field must return to some fundamental principles. Projects should rely on efficient building typologies—simple massing, repetitive unit layouts, and rational structural systems that reduce complexity and cost. Materials should be durable and economical rather than customized or expressive for their own sake. None of these decisions diminish architectural quality; in many cases they sharpen it.

More importantly, developers must resist the growing tendency to treat housing as a consumer product tailored to increasingly gentrified expectations. When residential buildings are optimized primarily for branding, curated amenities, and lifestyle packaging, the deeper social function of housing begins to recede.

Housing has historically served another role: the formation of communities. The dense urban neighborhoods shaped by the New York tenement—despite their serious shortcomings in comfort and sanitation—often supported strong social networks and everyday interaction among residents. Streets, stoops, and shared circulation spaces created a continuous field of encounter that helped bind communities together.

Contemporary housing development would benefit from recovering some of that logic. The challenge is not to reproduce the physical conditions of the past, but to remember what those environments understood well: that housing succeeds not when it behaves like a product, but when it functions as the physical framework for collective urban life.