More than seventy years ago the first public housing communities were built in the United States to provide decent, affordable housing that often replaced dreadful slums. Created by architectural and social idealists, these early public housing projects were typically well designed, mixed-income, and enriched with services for families and children. But within a decade, the goals of good design and improved living conditions were largely abandoned, as cost-containment became a much higher priority. Since then, our country has experienced a succession of community development strategies to improve the lives of low- and moderate-income families, largely driven by federal policies and funding. These included urban renewal, the War on Poverty, Model Cities, community development block grants, and numerous approaches to subsidizing affordable housing, but not one of these national initiatives embraced design excellence and sustainability as a means of creating better communities.

Since the 1930’s the community development industry has produced more than six million affordable homes and apartments and thousands of community facilities, but over a million of these were so poorly designed and managed that they have been dynamited or scheduled for eventual demolition. Most of the rest are better than the slums they replaced but are no more than simply serviceable. Until very recently, the visionaries in our field with higher ideals could be counted on one hand. One of them, James W. Rouse, had the audacity to say 30 years ago that our slums were a national disgrace, unparalleled among the developed countries, and that we should rebuild and replace them so that “these communities can become gardens that grow people.”
Only very recently—because of private inspiration, not public legislation—have examples of excellent community architecture become a reality. This small but growing community design movement was started by visionary architects, such as Mike Pyotok, and a handful of progressive community builders, both for-profit and nonprofit. It is this community movement that the Rose Architectural Fellowship is determined to make into the standard, not the exception.

In addition to pioneers showing the way, we are now seeing a growing number of structural solutions that are improving community design. Best practices are being shared peer-to-peer in symposia and online databases such as designadvisor.org. States and cities administering federal housing subsidies are rapidly adopting green building standards and adding points to their selection criteria for good design. Universities such as Arizona State are expanding community design curricula.

But a major structural barrier still remains—the lack of career entry points,and incentives for the best young designers to join and stay in the field of community development. Only a handful of the largest community development organizations have decided that they can afford to hire a staff architect. So they hire firms, where early-career architects are several thousand times more likely to be designing bathrooms and garages than assigned to all of the design phases of a community development project. And even the best are not likely to have all the skills necessary to produce the best designs for low- and moderate-income communities. Few if any architects may live in these neighborhoods. Budgets are so constrained that the designers have too little time to understand the neighborhood and get input from residents.

The Rose Fellowship leapfrogs these problems and offers early-career architects opportunities to receive experience and training in affordable housing and other community design work that adheres to sustainable principles. The fellowships become sudden immersion leaning experiences for the Fellows, who within a few months may not only be the chief designer for a project but sometimes project manager and financial packager as well.

Through the practical application of their skills, the Rose Fellows create living examples of beautiful, high quality, green, affordable housing and community facilities. They are proving to developers and financers in this field that it is possible to build reasonably priced, well designed homes and facilities. The Fellows are benefiting residents by providing new environments for living, working and meeting that are more livable, healthy, durable, resource efficient and cost-efficient than anything previously available. Building by building and block by block, the Fellows are making communities healthier and more attractive. And Fellows are inspiring others in their profession to follow in their footsteps, as they frequently speak to student and professional groups about the intersection of architecture, design, and community development.