Affordable housing in Houston

In 2015, architect Shelly Pottorf, AIA, and her students at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, began designing an ultra-efficient affordable housing prototype for a pocket neighborhood in Houston. Now—nine years, a handful of competition wins, and multiple iterations later—their creation is coming to life. 

Dubbed the Fly Flat, the development, which has received funding from the city of Houston, aims to revitalize low-income communities that have borne the brunt of everything from gentrification to slow recovery from storms like Hurricane Harvey. “This idea of sovereignty … is really important in all of it,” says the now Vermont-based Pottorf, who is serving as the project’s architect of record. “It's like, how do you return to the community the ability to self-actualize in their own image?”

That question helped guide the evolution of the Fly Flat, originally dreamed up for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Race to Zero competition (known today as the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge). Open to college students and their faculty advisors, the program (which ran from 2014-2018) invited teams to devise residential schemes that adhere to DOE Zero Energy Ready Home guidelines. While the competition emphasized sustainability as its main objective, the Prairie View team knew early on that their design—initially conceived for Houston’s Independence Heights neighborhood, from which many former and current Prairie View students hail—would aim to meet other goals, too. “[Race to Zero] had its own design problem, which was designing the energy efficient home, but Shelly added the social component to it,” says Nichole Thomas, a Prairie View grad who participated in the contest. “She brought us to the neighborhood and we got to speak with the residents. We asked what it was they needed and what their thoughts were.” 

Feedback obtained through this community engagement process—paramount to Pottorf’s work, which explores the relationship between sustainability and sociological wellbeing—gave the team their marching orders: Not only would they be designing net-zero housing, per Race to Zero’s requirements, but their concept would have to be affordable and resilient to hurricanes, too. “Besides the need for affordability, that [neighborhood] specifically dealt with a lot of flooding and damage from previous storms. Some of the residents were saying that their homes were flooded with four or five feet of water,” Thomas says. “[We thought], okay, well, whatever we do has to address that.” 

With these parameters in mind, the Prairie View A&M team of architecture, construction science, and mechanical engineering majors got to work, striving toward a design that would satisfy the neighborhood’s social, economic, and environmental demands. The group first entered what would ultimately become the Fly Flat to Race to Zero in 2015, adjusting the design for site conditions, evolving its underlying concepts, and resubmitting it to the context each year for our years. The team finally won the competition’s top prize in 2016, and then again in 2018. While the scheme took various forms over the years, what they ultimately arrived at was what Pottorf calls a “pocket neighborhood” anchored by 4 units set on two contiguous lots. Occupants prequalified through the city’s affordable housing program would populate the lots by choosing from a lineup of layouts, selecting either a studio, a 2-bedroom, or a 3-bedroom unit based on their needs. The units would be prefabricated off-site as modular components to maximize customization. “So there's a living component, there are bedroom components, et cetera, and you could in theory start with a studio, and then add on other pieces over time so that the house could grow as your family grows,” Pottorf explains. In keeping with the concept of restoring sovereignty, “The idea was that people would be able to configure their own Fly Flat and also choose what their pocket neighborhood had in it,” the architect adds. “You're choosing what this is and who you're living with.”  

Of course, the team considered the project’s resilience in other ways, too. In a departure from the slab-on-grade foundations that form the basis of many area homes, Fly Flat units would be built on elevated steel frames set higher than what’s required by code. Raising the units off the ground—and nixing the use of problematic concrete slabs, which prevent water absorption—minimizes potential flooding damage. To that end, the project also calls for the use of rigid exterior insulation, which stands up better to moisture. Drywall, meanwhile, would be installed horizontally (instead of vertically) to reduce waste in the event that materials need to be replaced. 

The rest of the design is equally hardworking. In an effort to promote a sense of community among Fly Flat occupants, the team gave careful consideration to the siting of each unit, as well as the makeup of the green space around it. Pathways to each unit converge to encourage chance interactions between neighbors, while carports provide shaded areas for gatherings. If all goes according to plan, residents will also mingle in the community gardens the team hopes to incorporate on the site.  

The project’s thoughtful features have generated lots of buzz. Shortly after taking the top spot at the 2018 Race to Zero competition, the Fly Flat was further honored with an AIA COTE Top 10 for Students Award and a Texas Society of Architects’ Studio Award. More significant, though, in 2018 the project was selected as a winner of Houston’s Complete the Community Housing and Urban Design Competition, which recognized conceptual designs for resilient single-family dwellings in the city’s underserved neighborhoods. Houston is now following through on its promise to bring it to life as a prototype, planning to erect an ADU and a 2-bedroom unit on one lot and an ADU and a 3-bedroom unit on the other to establish proof-of-concept.

Though there will be some other differences in the city’s approach—namely its decision not to pursue the modular construction approach strategy Pottorf’s team first envisioned—the design will remain largely intact once the city chooses a site (either in Independence Heights or another similar neighborhood) and establishes a construction schedule, both of which are still to be determined. Fundraising efforts, intended to supplement the financial resources coming from the city, are also underway.  

So, once complete, what will a project like this mean for Houston? A great deal, according to Thomas and Pottorf. The team hopes the development will encourage younger generations to return to the city—which, in addition to extreme weather events, has also struggled with historical redlining and misplaced freeway construction—while providing affordable, sustainable housing for the elders who never left. They also hope Fly Flat’s planned resilience features will make residents feel safe in their homes, especially those who are still recovering from the trauma of storms past.  

The team is keeping their fingers crossed for another outcome, too. Pottorf and her former students—whom the architect still asks to weigh in on the project as it evolves—believe the Fly Flat has the potential to inspire solutions in communities outside of Houston, too. Katrin Klingenberg, the executive director of Phius—which is currently consulting on the microgrid prototype the city plans to build and will monitor its performance upon completion—agrees. “The Fly Flat project impacts passive building in a number of ways, perhaps the greatest of which is its potential for replicability,” she says. “The design of the Fly Flat is an ideal example of how an underserved community can be transformed into a resilient, efficient, and affordable place to live.” 

Pottorf feels especially strongly about the potential of the fly roof, which she thinks could be instrumental to other projects facing similar challenges. “I do think that this double-roof thing is a game-changer if it could catch on, if people could really understand it and experience it and see the proof of concept,” she says.