From the April/May 2007 issue of New Urban News

Fighting for good, affordable neighborhoods

Robert Steuteville

 Courtesy of Torti Gallas and Partners
In the battle for affordable housing, calling in the US armed forces may seem excessive — until you take a look at some of the new military neighborhoods being built. The Charter Award-winning housing at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, Virginia, offers everything a traditional neighborhood development (TND) should, at rental rates affordable to young military families. Fort Belvoir’s neighborhoods — the first two called Herryford and Vernondale — are built and financed by the private sector.
The design of the Fort Belvoir TND puts an emphasis on diverse streetscapes and housing units, walkable blocks and streets, small neighborhood parks, and mixed-use Main Street buildings. Less obvious — intentionally so — are things that keep construction costs low: on-grade concrete foundations, vinyl siding, and simple massing. Even with its economical methods, Fort Belvoir looks better than many run-of-the-mill TNDs where construction and development costs are far higher.
Rental rates at Fort Belvoir, like those at other military bases, are established by formulas tied to local markets, and are approximately $1,000 per month lower than the military families would pay for non-base housing, notes John Torti, principal of the architecture and urban design firm Torti Gallas and Partners.
Torti Gallas and its development partner, Clark Realty, are working on military housing reconstruction projects at a number of bases nationwide. In a tough process, they compete on a cost and design basis with conventional design teams and with a handful of new urbanist firms — including Urban Design Associates, Looney Ricks Kiss, Wallace Roberts & Todd, and Calthorpe Associates — that in many cases use similar techniques. Projects like Fort Belvoir offers lessons to new urbanists struggling with the problem of affordable housing.

GEARED TOWARDS AFFORDABILITY
The financial structure of military base reconstruction contributes to affordability, Torti reports. The scale of the projects is huge, often ranging from $500 million to a billion dollars. For the Residential Communities Initiative (RCI) military housing privatization program under which Fort Belvoir is being redeveloped, the developer is given 50-year control over the real estate business relating to base housing. These projects receive immediate long-term financing on Wall Street, Torti explains. “The power of continuous income, very favorable financing terms, and scale” allows developers to make a profit at substantially below-market rate rents, he explains.
The complex military housing program is predicated on grade and rank, type of family, and accessibility to the handicapped. Torti describes a matrix that starts with about seven types of units in Fort Belvoir — units with two, three, and four bedrooms, handicapped accessible versions of these, and versions with attached and detached garages. Those units come in two to six sizes, reflecting housing allowances allocated by rank. An enlisted soldier gets a certain allowance, an enlisted officer a higher allowance, a commissioned officer higher, and so on. At Belvoir this matrix produces about 28 different units. Unit sizes range from 1,600 to 2,400 square feet. (When single military personnel are included in the program, units are as small as 900 feet; at this point, all of Fort Belvoir’s new urban villages are for families.) The visual impression at Fort Belvoir is that house sizes are more comparable to historic working-class neighborhoods than to upscale TNDs — which generally include much bigger units.
Each of the 28 unit types and sizes is offered with a variety of styles, details, and colors. Generally two to three styles are offered at Torti Gallas military housing projects. At Fort Belvoir the styles are colonial and Italianate. Then there are questions of detail — does the unit have a brick façade or not? A porch? Will the gable face the street? A final dimension is color, and Torti Gallas employs a color consultant to help make appropriate choices. “Put all of this together, and you have 400-500 different combinations,” Torti says. “Once we hit 800.” Military housing neighborhoods are generally 150 to 200 units, so rarely does one see the exact same house repeated in a neighborhood. Entire streetscapes are never repeated (see photos below). This gives new urbanist neighborhoods like Fort Belvoir’s a genuine sense of variety. RCI projects often include many neighborhoods, with 1,200 to 2,500 units in all. At Fort Belvoir, 1,620 new houses will be built and 170 units renovated.

DESIGN PROCESS
The design process begins, as in most TNDs, with thorough research of the local vernacular. That involves a dissection not only of the best nearby civilian towns and neighborhoods, but also of military housing from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which generally followed the principles of walkable urbanism. These older military neighborhoods are often coveted as the best housing on base, Torti says. Preliminary urban design ideas are drawn up, and then urban designers, architects, developers, builders, and project managers are brought into what Torti calls a “war room” to work out details.
The first exercise is to look at the best possible development that could be done. Then cost constraints and military requirements are factored in. Cost is a highly limiting factor, although for competitive reasons Torti declines to discuss the actual cost per square foot. A very low cost number is targeted and many tough choices are made, Rob Goodill, principal in charge of planning at Torti Gallas’s Silver Spring headquarters, told New Urban News.
The least expensive foundations, concrete slab, are specified. Using a technique that Torti Gallas perfected in HOPE VI projects, lots are graded to create a slight elevation from the street — allowing for two or three steps up from the sidewalk (see photo detail, below). This illustrates one of the tradeoffs — and battles — the firm faces in affordable neighborhoods. Inexpensive foundations and minimization of grading are very important to keeping costs under control. As Torti puts it: “We’ve become very experienced at grading, at fitting the house as gently as possible on the land. All kinds of good things happen when you do that. The costs come down and you get a better streetscape.”
But there are principles the firm will not compromise on, and grade separation is one of them. “In my mind there is a minimum conceptual set of issues that needs to get resolved,” Torti says. “We do not believe neighborhoods would work as well with the doors at the same grade as sidewalk.” Builders usually complain about the steps, he adds, but costs can be cut by setting a consistent height from the sidewalk. “Once you decide to mound up the grading, you set the platform of all houses up several steps,” he explains. “The relative juxtaposition of the house allows you to build closer and get a tighter, more well-knit community.” To add to privacy, townhouses and single houses at Belvoir are set back from the sidewalk 10 to 14 feet.
Vinyl is used extensively as siding, but Torti Gallas requires that 30 percent of the vinyl be of an upgraded quality. This is important for achieving Fort Belvoir’s strong colors — with vinyl, you pay extra for anything that isn’t beige, taupe, or white. Dark-colored vinyl also helps to make the transition from brick facades less glaring (see photo detail on page 11). Torti acknowledges that the colors never get as good as they do with paint. “Color, even a beige, looks 10 times better painted than in vinyl.” He says. “It’s deeper, there is a better texture to it.” As a side note, Torti Gallas is currently debating the continued use of vinyl as it attempts to move to 100 percent LEED-ND (LEED for Neighborhood Development) rated projects.
At Fort Belvoir, porches and brick facades are used to create variety and color in the streetscapes. The brick is expensive — one brick façade costs the equivalent of three six- to seven-foot-deep porches — and a lot of it is used. “At Belvoir, we made some commitments to the Army in terms of brick,” Torti says. “This is a historically brick base.”
Porches and trim are carefully dissected to get the most bang for the buck. “We go to the mat over the details, the proportions, and the density,” says Torti. “We spend the little bit of money that we have very, very judiciously.”

ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES
The balance between compromises on materials and cost, on the one hand, and the goal of creating a human-scale neighborhood, on the other hand, demands judgments related to architecture and style. “What we try to do, when we do a historical style, is use as many of the principles that the style incorporates as we possibly can,” he explains. “Windows are smaller on second floor than the first, so there is a hierarchy there. Proportions are in keeping with that style. The relationship of solid to glass relates to that style. We respect the architecture when we take on that architecture,” he says.
But here’s the catch — when dealing with “true vernacular,” Torti says, often the walls are thicker and the windows have “all kinds of dimensions. The [inexpensive] windows we use have no [variation in] dimensions. So we employ different window trimming systems that embellish on the dimensions you see. We accommodate and try to make up for what is not there.” Similarly, vinyl requires some extra effort to make up for what is lacking in color and texture. When the firm used concrete block walls with stucco in Florida, windows could be set far into the walls, creating shadow lines and dimension, Torti says. There, no trim was required.
To make sure the builders get it right, full-scale models of every important detail are created in a warehouse (see photo at right). This has a transformative effect on the builders, Torti says, who “become stronger advocates for the details than we are,” when the subcontractors are hired to do the trim and install doors and windows.
The war-room decisions go beyond the individual buildings and extend to entire neighborhoods. “It’s not just a question of this façade or that porch but how the blocks come together,” Torti says. A model of every block is created, with actual facades, building types, and colors. The traditional architecture that Torti Gallas favors helps to control costs in some respects, Torti says. “The massing is simple — in the best traditions of simplicity over complexity.”
The land planning for the neighborhoods is done in a similar way to Torti Gallas’s market-rate TNDs, except in some ways with a greater emphasis on cutting costs. Greens are generally attached, which saves a lot of infrastructure expense. “We don’t necessarily put a street around every green in market-rate neighborhoods, but in an affordable neighborhood we do tend to attach the greens more,” Goodill says. In some of the military neighborhoods — not those at Fort Belvoir — Torti Gallas has made the blocks a little longer, as well. The alleys are asphalt, 12 feet wide, with no curbs. Military families tend to be young and therefore often have children, and frequent tot lots are required. “In most of our designs, within 2 1/2 minutes of every house is a play area or a tot lot,” Goodill says.
Most TNDs are governed by a code, pattern book, or architectural guidelines, but there are generally many architects involved — and the architect is usually not the urban designer. Fort Belvoir has a single architect and urban designer. “This makes an interesting argument for the ‘big architecture’ project,” says Torti. “Because of the integrated process, you can produce this quality place for this [cost] number. I don’t think you get that quality of place for that number with the typical process.”
At Fort Belvoir, costly and thorough design is combined with inexpensive materials and construction. The result is a good neighborhood with a high degree of affordability.

Every important detail that will be repeated — including cornices, doors, and windows — is built as a full-scale prototype in a warehouse to help reduce errors in the actual houses. Where houses are faced in brick (see left), the brick turns the corner by two lengths, giving the impression that it can support the heavy cornice. The vinyl on the side is dark, so as to minimize contrast with the brick.
Photo courtesy of Torti Gallas and Partners

This article is available in the April/May 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.