This fall, two exhibitions have waded into the contentious waters of New York City’s top policy issue of the day: the lack of affordable housing. The two should be seen in conjunction. ... My expectations of both exhibitions were high. I watched them evolve and have myself attempted to articulate the relationship of inequality and housing through the Buell Center’s House Housing project and exhibitions I was curious to see how each would handle the triad invariably involved in the production of housing: design, government, and the ever-elusive, but all-important finance. (Clearly, many more players have a stake in housing, including the users. In this sense, it’s even more dramatic that housing has in recent decades turned from human shelter into an object of investment and securitization — in many cases, a tax shelter.) And I was keen to see how the two sponsoring institutions would make use of a temporary installation to explain what is at stake amid these diverse players’ competing interests in a way that New York Times op-eds, HBO mini-series, or think tank reports cannot.

At the outset, the two shows refrain from tackling the Housing Question as framed by Friedrich Engels: that we will never solve the housing problem unless we change the capitalist mode of production which, by definition, creates scarcity and speculation-induced prices However, simply by using the term affordability, the exhibitions rightfully do place the disconnect between what someone makes and the cost of a roof over one’s head at the center of their investigations. I was also delighted that both exhibitions attempt to explain, through clear language and wall graphics, what exactly “affordable housing” is since it’s not an easy term to grasp. (For instance, why is governmentally assisted, income- and price-restricted housing often more expensive to produce than unregulated housing?) However, neither show addresses the underlying question of why all the different efforts aren’t adding up to ease the problem. Neither then moves beyond affirming the validity of the system of housing production we have today: a tax payer-incentivized, profit-oriented real estate market. While Mellins makes the case for the legitimacy of government intervention given the shortcomings of this system, Norman proposes that we might be able to do without government intervention if we fully tapped our architectural ingenuity.

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Affordable New York is conceptually rigorous if uninventive. Mellins uses the established use of “affordable” — income-restricted, price-regulated housing — and focuses on New York City exclusively. Accordingly, the exhibition’s narrative trajectory is chronological. It aims to explain the reasons why the public sector got involved in housing in the first place and how those have evolved through four broad local phases that largely coincide with national and global shifts. “Creating a Housing Agenda, 1867–1934″ reflects early private, philanthropic efforts to reform housing in the industrializing city and the advent of the New Deal. “Building Big: The New York City Housing Authority, 1934–1973″ on traditional public housing and “Building Big: Beyond Public Housing, 1945–1973″ on middle-class housing programs focus on the direct involvement of federal, state, and municipal government in housing development, ending with the faltering of postwar growth in the early 1970s and the pinnacle of the “urban crisis.” Finally, “Seeking New Visions: 1973–Present” takes us into the multiplicity of programs that create low- and moderate-income housing today, which generally piggyback onto market-rate housing through tax or zoning incentives.

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In its rhetorical focus on design, Designing Affordability not only avoids addressing questions of policy and politics, but also shortchanges the financing connected to them, something it claims to address. Under “Reimagining Public Housing,” the exhibition features Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux, France, a project by Lacaton & Vassal, Frédéric Druot Architecture, and Christophe Hutin. Like some of the firms’ earlier projects, they transform a high-rise social housing slab by wrapping it with a layer of enclosed porches, thereby improving living space and increasing energy efficiency. If the exhibition had asked what made this design strategy of layering or thickening possible in low-income housing in Bordeaux, and what makes it nearly impossible in US housing for the same target group, this would have been fodder enough for an entire exhibition. How much did it cost? Who is paying for it? That the example is presented under the rubric of public housing — the one form of housing development that creates dwellings beyond the reach of the market, but the one option no longer on the table politically today — should itself be food for thought.