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Housing is not just an urban issue.
While nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in Los Angeles and New York City, rural communities also don’t have enough affordable housing. Last year, the rate of homelessness among rural residents increased by 10%.
Enter Auburn University’s Village Studio.
The architecture studio has been rooted in Alabama’s Black Belt for 30 years, providing three benefits: residents receive free housing, students in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture learn through hands-on construction, and the school experiments with new ways to design sustainably rural life to address shortages.
The studio is now sharing its lessons learned and home designs with partners in six other states, including Louisiana.
Here are some of the lessons they imparted.
Multi-generational housing
Rural Studio students learn not only from the award-winning architects who mentor them, but also from the people they help in Hale County, where the program is located, such as Reggie Walker.
Hale County, with a population of about 14,000, is located in Alabama’s Black Belt region, a region known for its fertile soil and high levels of poverty.
In 1981, Walker left and joined the Army, then moved back to his childhood home.
“Logic tells me it’s better to be poor at home than in a big city,” Walker said.
But when Walker returned home, the house had been unoccupied for years and needed to be demolished. Only the family’s fireplace remains standing.
Outside of rural areas, homeowners are selling their homes hoping to stand out. According to the National Association of Realtors, home sellers have lived in their homes for an average of 10 years.
Rural homeowners are the exception. Generally speaking, rural residents tend to keep their homes and pass them on to their children. A major factor contributing to this phenomenon is the relatively low stock of rural housing.
“Most homes are passed down from generation to generation,” Walker said. “But unfortunately, because people don’t make a lot of money, the houses actually become dilapidated with people living in them.”
Building a country home means thinking about how to ensure it lasts for generations to come. Rural Studio students had this in mind when they helped Walker demolish his old house and design his new one three years ago.
Designing a house to be renovated
Walker told the students he just wanted a place to sleep, shower and have a roof over his head. For the last wish, the students went one step further.
Country houses are often adapted to meet the needs of the family, such as extending the house to make room for more residents. But constantly cutting into your roof for renovations can cause permanent damage.
The Walkers’ solution: a freestanding roof. The students built two shed-sized buildings complete with bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and more. Above it they built a large roof, unrelated to any building, that stood overhead along with a section of foundation. This allows Walker to add to and expand his home in the future without having to touch the roof.
“That house can be modified, expanded, added to, changed,” said Rusty Smith, associate director of Village Studio. “There’s no need to cut it, no need to put holes in it, no need to destroy the waterproof barrier around the roof.”
The same need for flexibility applies to the interior design of these houses, where rooms have no specific names. A room might be used as a guest room one year, a living room the next, or even space for a home business.
The studio now builds the house with this in mind, such as placing exterior doors so long-term guests have a private entrance.
“A small move, like changing the position of a door, is a big deal,” says Village Studio director Andrew Friar. “We try to create plans without room names. We really try to better allow our residents to decide how they want to live.”
Affordable does not mean cheap
Smith said that in the early days of Rural Studio, the program was focused on making their housing as affordable as possible, something the team calls the “20K Project.”
While the moniker isn’t a hard and fast rule, Rural Studio often meets the challenge of spending only $20,000 on the materials needed for each project.
The challenge also taught them an important lesson: building “low-cost housing” by saving materials does not equate to “affordable housing,” nor will it necessarily save homeowners in the long run.
“Sometimes it’s actually the most affordable to have people live in homes that cost more to build,” Smith said.
What Smith means is that if architects focus solely on minimizing the final cost of a home, they’ll skip over issues like energy efficiency. But this ignores most people’s actual housing budget – their monthly expenses through their mortgage. Once you think of homeownership as a monthly cost, you can consider other expenses, such as utilities.
The studio came up with a cost-effective equation: Spending $5,000 on an energy-efficient home can pay for itself if the monthly electricity bill drops by $25.
It’s a win for everyone – the homeowner gets a more valuable home, banks have less risk in approving a more valuable home, and less energy is wasted, so it’s better for the planet It’s a victory.
Lack of infrastructure hampers new housing construction
Often, the biggest challenge to building more rural housing has nothing to do with affordability. In contrast, rural areas lack services such as fire departments.
Such is the case in Newbern, the Black Belt town where Country Studios is located.
Homes are burning down at such a high rate that residents are unable to obtain home insurance. It also prevents them from getting mortgages to finance the construction of new homes.
“A lot of affordability issues go beyond just making housing affordable,” Smith said. “That actually makes it possible.”
Rural Studio’s solution was to build a different type of house in 2004 – the Newbern Fire Station.
The lack of infrastructure in towns such as Newbern may also extend to sanitation. Local governments won’t approve new buildings without a plan to deal with the waste, and the Black Belt’s clay types often cause on-site septic systems to fail.
To address this issue, Rural Studio is now trialling cluster-design sewers for rural homes.
Need temporary housing
Smith and other leaders of Village Studios see their role as building permanent housing. But over the years, they’ve heard more and more from community members that they, too, need temporary housing.
Rural areas often lack social service infrastructure, and temporary housing is particularly scarce. People often live in the woods, in their cars or with friends or family – sometimes illegally, depending on the lease. This is why rural homelessness is often described as “hidden”.
“In Birmingham … you see people on the street, right?” Emifa Butler said. “Anywhere you go in rural Alabama, most of the time you won’t see anyone on the street. What you will see are people living with their cousins.” [and] The uncles are all gathered at grandma’s house. “
Butler founded her nonprofit CHOICE with the mission of providing wraparound resources to young people in Uniontown and Hale County. Butler said the closest emergency shelter to Uniontown is 47 miles away, while the nearest hotel is only slightly closer, 22 miles away. Butler said sending people who need short-term help either way — away from their communities and support networks — is not a good idea.
But now, there’s a closer option.
Rural Studio built CHOICE House – a two-unit emergency shelter built by students last year. Two families can live in these units for up to a month.
“In order to meet long-term needs, we believe we need to meet short-term needs,” Butler said. “A permanent solution is to build shelters instead of paying people to stay in hotels.”
share knowledge
Country Studios has recently expanded beyond the Black Belt.
Last year, partners in six states built homes based on the studio’s prototypes, including Habitat for Humanity in Greenville County, South Carolina, and a home built in Lafayette, Louisiana.
In addition to helping rural homeowners in and around Alabama, students leave the program with a unique experience. There are few other architecture programs where students pick up a hammer, let alone participate in a design from conception to construction.
AC Priest graduated from Auburn University in 2022, but continued to work as a student volunteer to complete the construction of CHOICE House. Before that, she didn’t own a pair of work boots.
When she entered the field of architecture, her takeaway from the studio experience was that the projects were about building community because you never know when you might need a neighbor to complete a concrete renovation.
“Everyone is important in a project like this,” Priest said. “It’s not just you and your great ideas.”
This story is written by gulf states newsroomcooperation between mississippi public broadcasting, WBHM In Alabama, world network number and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
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