"Something very profound seems to happen to people when they live in a building that's historic and beautiful," says Rosanne Haggerty, founder and president of Common Ground Community, a New York City-based nonprofit housing and community development organization. Haggerty's work attests to the power of good design-not only in historic structures, but in forward-looking contemporary architecture as well-to uplift and inspire residents. Started in 1990 with the restoration and transformation of the dilapidated Times Square Hotel into living units for low-income and formerly homeless individuals, Common Ground now serves over 1,300 residents in sites throughout the city, and has become a leading proponent of affordable housing that integrates shelter with social services and high-quality design.

Not only does design improve tenants' quality of life, asserts Haggerty, but it pays: Part of the funding for projects like the Times Square Hotel, for which Common Ground secured historic landmark status, comes from federal historic-preservation tax credits. Other financing comes from low-income tax credits, rent-all tenants pay rent, either with government vouchers, or on a sliding scale according to income-and a combination of low-interest loans and city, state, and private grants. In this way, the net cost of running what housing advocates call "supportive housing"-in effect, a humane and thoughtful reinvention of the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel with on-site services such as healthcare and job counseling-is less than that of running a typical shelter or rehabilitation facility. And unlike state and local housing agencies, whose flexibility is inhibited by the many regulations that come with mostly federal funding, groups like Common Ground, by combining funds from various sources, retain the ability to experiment with innovative models of housing.

Haggerty is now applying her decade-plus of experience with Common Ground to an ambitious new project, a model called "first-step housing" that will serve individuals who are not ready for permanent living arrangements. It will be the nonprofit's answer to the now dwindling number of notorious "lodging houses," or flophouses, that once lined Manhattan's Bowery, where men could sleep on partitioned-off cots for only a few dollars per night. Years of studying compact dwelling units-research that took Haggerty from the streets of New York City to the capsule hotels of Japan-culminated last year in the First Step Housing international design competition (see "A Step Up for Small Spaces," page 31) cosponsored by Common Ground and The Architectural League of New York and led by architect Michael Bell, who runs the housing studio at Columbia University's architecture school.
The competition mandate was to re-envision an interior configuration for the Andrews-one of the few still-operating lodging houses on the Bowery, which Common Ground purchased in 2002-that would be "comfortable, efficient, dignified, and inexpensive," says Haggerty. A total of 180 submissions from around the world were reviewed, and five winners were chosen by a technical jury-including city planners, code inspectors, and cost estimators, as well as a tenant from the Andrews and the current building supervisor-and by a design jury made up of Haggerty, Bell, Common Ground's staff architect Nadine Maleh, and architects Toshiko Mori, Steven Holl, Julie Eizenberg, and Andrew Freer of Auburn University's Rural Studio.

Major design challenges, says Bell, were the project cost and the unusually narrow footprint of the building (20 feet wide by 150 feet long). In addition, fire codes mandate that the partitions for the sleeping units be treated as furniture and not extend to the ceiling. Prevailing themes among the entries, Bell reports, were mass production and prefabrication to lower costs and afford easy replicability for other sites. To maximize space and natural light in the building's narrow corridors, some of the competition-stage designs employed translucent partitions and sliding doors, though tenant feedback on the winning entries included concerns for privacy and having a lockable swinging door. Currently, the premiated designs are undergoing further development, and by the end of September, Common Ground will decide which ones can move forward into prototypes. Fabrication and installation will begin in 2005, when work on the shell of the Andrews, by Richard Vitto of New York City's Oaklander Coogan and Vitto Architects, is complete.

AN SRO FROM THE GROUND UP
Forging ahead into other realms of design, Common Ground is developing its first ground-up construction, a 200-unit building in downtown Brooklyn designed by firm partners Susan Rodriguez and Timothy Hartung of Polshek Partnership. The project is a joint venture between Common Ground and the Actors' Fund of America, for whom Common Ground already manages a low-income residence for entertainment professionals in Manhattan. Like the Times Square Hotel, the Brooklyn building will house a fifty-fifty mix of formerly homeless people and low-income tenants, many of whom, in this case, are employed in the arts and entertainment industries.

The land for the project, part of a parcel being developed by Hamlin Ventures and Time Equities, was given to Common Ground by the developers because, as a city-designated urban-renewal site, a portion of the property had to be dedicated to low-income housing. The rest of the site will contain market-rate residential and commercial buildings. Common Ground chose Polshek Partnership in part because of the firm's previous experience on projects like The Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan that also faced this site's peculiar challenge: close proximity to a subway tunnel. In some areas, the structure will sit only 5 inches above the train passage. Four 23-foot trusses, which are exposed at the first two stories, suspend the building over the tunnel and visually "set the presence of the building apart from traditional low-income projects" Hartung believes. "Part of Common Ground's mission [with this project]," he adds, is to establish "pride of place." Incorporating sustainable initiatives is another goal of the project; the architects are following LEED guidelines (and may apply for the certification, if funding allows) and are pursuing the use of green roofs, daylighting-the front of the building is mainly glass-and recycled materials. Construction starts next year, and completion is planned for 2007.

Beyond communicating its ideology through architectural expression locally, Common Ground is spreading its innovative thinking about homelessness to cities across the United States and around the world. In addition to partnering with local organizations on projects in London; Newburgh, New York; and Hartford and Willimantic, Connecticut, the nonprofit runs a "replication" program that educates housing organizations in countries as far away as Australia and Japan. With the First Step Housing competition, Haggerty hopes to also inspire other humane approaches to temporary shelter. With her imaginative and pragmatic approach to affordable housing, she stands a very good chance.