Imagining Housing for Today

Serious architecture is another way to describe Bronx Park East. It is a single-room occupancy residence, an S.R.O., built to house tenants who had been homeless. Sunny, with modest kitchens and full bathrooms, its apartments are smaller (around 285 square feet) than otherwise legally permitted for studios in New York because different rules apply to housing for social service clients. The building has a handsomely proportioned facade, spacious public rooms and light-filled hallways, none of it standard for an S.R.O.

The other morning a few residents were out on the sidewalk taking in the sun, chatting with people from next door. “Isn’t the idea here to improve mental health?” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “Isn’t good architecture part of that?”

It is, and Bronx Park East, like other S.R.O.’s Mr. Kirschenfeld has designed in the city, lends dignity to what at least used to be a byword for urban pariah and a building type that often resembled a prison.

But the project is exemplary for another reason, too.

Most new homes in the city today are still designed for nuclear families. According to the nonprofit Citizens Housing & Planning Council, two parents raising young children occupy only 17 percent of New York dwellings; another 9 percent house single parents with children under 25. The city meanwhile has a growing population of singles — students, young professionals, immigrants, empty-nesters and the elderly — who can’t afford market-rate rentals. (That’s not to mention a report last week from the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group that has frequently clashed with the Bloomberg administration , which put the city’s homeless population at 41,204, up from 31,000 a decade ago.)

Households have evolved. But New York’s housing stock hasn’t. In essence, New Yorkers have increasingly had to adapt to the housing we’ve got, instead of designing and building the housing that suits who we have become.

The problem? Partly, a collection of sometimes conflicting city and state laws that do things like dictate minimum room sizes, prohibit the construction of apartments without kitchens or bathrooms, and outlaw more than three or four unrelated people sharing an apartment. Other rules compel developers in many parts of town to construct a parking space for each new unit they build, a disincentive for designing many smaller, inexpensive apartments as opposed to just a few big ones, never mind what the rules imply for the environment.

Of course safety and fire concerns account for many codes. But together these good laws and outmoded ones have forced much of the city’s housing population underground, into illegal shares and jerry-built apartments.

As David Burney, the city’s commissioner for the Department of Design and Construction, put it the other day, “The regulatory environment has fallen behind” the times. So had a conspicuous part of the architecture world, which, until lately at least, focused on glamour projects rather than on how most people live.

In the past New York has adapted to changing household patterns. For example, grand Upper West Side apartments from a century ago were chopped up to provide more units for smaller families that no longer employed live-in servants . The question now is can the city become nimble again? Boston has zoned for micro-units to accommodate the young population and others struggling with market rates, on whom civic competitiveness and social equity ultimately depend. Can New York also meet the social and economic needs of the 21st century?