An article from WWNO covers what an architecture studio has learned from 30 years of building in Alabama’s Black Belt. These are typically rural homes facing many of the same challenges we cover on The Pretty Good Builder. Read the full article here: What architects learned from 30 years of building affordable homes in Alabama’s Black Belt

Built to Last

The Pretty Good House (PGH) has a mantra that says homes should be “durable” and “resilient”.

Generally, rural residents often hold on to their home and pass it on to their children.

“Most houses are passed down from generation to generation to generation,” Walker said. “But unfortunately, because people don’t have a lot of income, the houses actually become dilapidated, with people still living inside of them.”

Building a rural home means considering how to make sure it lasts across generations.

Smart Budgets

The PGH points out that homes should be “as small as possible” and “affordable”.

The challenge also taught them an important lesson: Building a “cheap house” by saving on materials doesn’t equal “affordable housing,” nor does it always save the homeowner in the long run.

“Sometimes, getting folks into a house that actually costs more to build is actually what’s the most affordable,” Smith said.

What Smith means is if an architect focuses solely on getting a home’s final cost as low as possible, they’ll skip on things like energy efficiency. But that’s ignoring how most people actually budget for a home — as a monthly expense through their mortgage. Once you consider homeownership as a monthly cost, other expenses can be factored in, like utility bills.

The studio figured out a cost-effective equation — spending $5,000 to make a house energy efficient pays for itself if it lowers the power bill by $25 a month.

That’s a win for everyone — the homeowner gets a more valuable house, a more valuable home is less risky for a bank to approve a loan and less energy gets wasted, so it’s a win for the planet.

Rural Infrastructure

We cover the difficulties of utilities in our guides – and the need to design in redundancy.

Often, the biggest challenge to building more rural homes has little to do with affordability. Instead, it’s a shortage of services in rural areas, like fire departments.

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Houses were burning down at a high rate, so residents could not get home insurance. It also prevented them from getting mortgages to finance building a new home.

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The Rural Studio’s solution was to construct a different kind of house in 2004 — Newbern’s firehouse.

The lack of infrastructure in towns like Newbern can also extend to sanitation. Local governments won’t sign off on a new building without a plan for dealing with its waste, and the type of clay in the Black Belt often causes on-site septic systems to fail.

To combat this, the Rural Studio is now experimenting with cluster-design sanitary sewers to be used for rural homes.