Since 1967, first-year students at Yale University’s School of Architecture have each year worked on designing and building a home in poor and working-class neighborhoods all over New Haven, Connecticut. For the past few years, the school has entered into an agreement with the Friends Center for Children to build rent-free housing for the innovative daycare center’s early childhood educators.
The architecture school’s Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, as it’s known, has thus far built four homes at the Children’s Center, creating a village where families support each other and socialize together. The project has future plans to build at least three more homes on the site.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Adam Hopfner, director of the project, who talks about the design of the houses and the positive impact free housing has on the teachers’ ability to do their job.
ADAM HOPFNER: The ethos of the building project has always been raising social consciousness and providing design services for a part of the community that is often so underserved by architecture. We’re working on the fourth of four homes that are on this one site and we’ve effectively created a village. And in fact, when they acquired the site, they acquired a building—a residence on that site and then there’s almost two acres of property behind that.
But we essentially developed a village plan with the Friends Center and went through all the various agencies. We had support from the city, which was wonderful. And ultimately, we had support from the neighborhood as well. There was resistance to some change and that’s understandable. We’ve tried to be really good neighbors in terms of trying to minimize the impact and sight lines from the existing houses.
MELINDA TUHUS: So are they considered singl- family? Because it sounds like they’re kind of two-family, but they share a kitchen, but everything else is separate?
ADAM HOPFNER: They are legal single families, just to be clear. The first house and the second house both are three bedrooms, single kitchen, single dining area. But it goes to question, what is a family? What does a family consist of? Is it Ozzy and Harriet and 2.5 children?
And the vast majority of households are not Ozzy and Harriet. And so we’re completely compliant with the zoning regulations and it just so happens that sometimes there are two different constituents who are sharing a house. And so in the case of the house in 23 and the house in 24, again, they were both three- bedroom houses, but the way it was arranged, there’s one sort of “unit” which has two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living space. And then another unit has a bedroom and a bathroom and a living space. And it’s all under one roof and it’s all within the same footprint.
And then they share an entryway and a kitchen and dining area.
MELINDA TUHUS: So far, all the ones you’ve built are in this one spot. Do you know where else you’re going to be building?
ADAM HOPFNER: We’re in process right now of looking for various sites. We really feel like this model of community living or village living seems to really sort of resonate with the people who live there. We’re working with the Friend Center. We’re working with the folks in the city of New Haven to look to try to identify a property that could perhaps accommodate multiple homes.
MELINDA TUHUS: This whole project addresses this critical problem of people not earning enough in the daycare field to be able to support themselves, basically.
ADAM HOPFNER: I’m sure you know the rate of turnover in this profession is extreme because it’s simply not affordable. And the stresses that these teachers have, they’re doing such important work and yet the stresses that they bring has to impact the way in which they teach and how they care for their children. And so this idea of providing housing as part of the compensation package, it’s such an opportunity to provide for a level of stability—financial stability and the emotional stability that comes with that. And I’m sure that the turnover rate is significantly reduced because that stressor has been alleviated.
MELINDA TUHUS: This is all like sweat equity or whatever you call it by the part of you and the students. So that doesn’t cost anything, but there’s still costs. So who pays for the permitting and who pays for the materials and all that?
ADAM HOPFNER: We worked with Friends Center to say, this is how much we think ultimately, just given our experience of building, this is how much it’s going to cost us to build these projects. They actually fundraise and provide the money for the material costs and the like. What we do is we bring, as you say, our sweat equity. I mean, I would hope that our intellectual capital is worth something. So we bring our designs and we do a tremendous amount of begging essentially for materials and in-kind donations. So we tend to build these houses for certainly less than half what it would otherwise cost. And we do it in half the time that it would otherwise typically take to build these things.
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