Affordable housing in East Oakland: Payotok’s Hismen Hin’Nu Terrace Project. To date, Pyatok has designed over 12,000 units of affordable housing for low-income households.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Pyatok
May 2004
Oakland’s Affordable Housing Hero
Michael Pyatok helps poor and working-class families design their own living spaces.
by Steve Lerner
Michael (Mike) Pyatok sits gingerly in his downtown Oakland architectural offices, wincing from a back spasm that kicked in the night before. With the neck of his blue shirt open, sleeves rolled up, and rimless glasses set on a clean-shaven face, Pyatok is a no-frills kind of a guy. You might easily mistake him for a labor negotiator. Despite a subdued and modest manner, Pyatok, 60, is at the forefront of a movement to give local residents a voice in the design of affordable housing built in their neighborhoods.
While many architects salivate at the prospect of designing over-sized, high-priced homes that showcase their skills and dream of seeing their work featured in Architectural Digest, Pyatok took a different path and put his talents to work building affordable housing for families on welfare and the working poor. He is doubly unusual as an architect because he does not think he has all the answers. Instead of creating some shockingly new design that will win him prizes and acclaim, Pyatok visits the neighborhood where the project is slated and engages the community in a series of design workshops. He is convinced that local residents have great wisdom about what kind of housing will work best for them.
A Working-Class Architect
This willingness to listen to residents was born of Pyatok’s personal history. “I came from a welfare family and grew up in the tenements of Brooklyn,” Pyatok explains. An exceptional student, he attended the tuition-free St. Regis Jesuit School in Manhattan, Harvard University, and Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture. Later, Pyatok became a Fulbright scholar in Finland and was appointed a Loeb Fellow at Harvard.
“All this education was layered on a working-class mindset,” Pyatok observes. Now that he runs a firm with three junior partners and 24 architects, one would expect Pyatok to move “uptown” into an affluent neighborhood. Instead, he chose to live in a series of low-income communities, first in Philadelphia, then St. Louis and now in Oakland, so he can “be in the thick of it” and understand the realities faced by those he serves. This background led him to design affordable housing that residents can use as a live/work space out of which they can run a home-based business or sublet an apartment to earn extra income. Some of his designs for first-time homeowners are also “expandable” so that owners can add on to their homes as they accumulate savings.
To date, Pyatok has designed over 12,000 units of affordable housing for low-income households. Pyatok has spent a lifetime refining participatory design methods that use easily understood graphics and models to help residents make well-informed housing decisions. These aids help residents decide how many units to place on the site, how to organize the units, where to locate open space, how to handle parking, what profile the structure will present to the neighborhood, and which materials and colors best suit the buildings.
This commitment to community involvement in design started early in Pyatok’s career. In the 1960s, while still a student, he was involved in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. His activism led him to be part of a group of fellow students engaged in a critique of the top-down way in which architects decided what was good for a community and then imposed their design on the neighborhood. He was particularly disturbed by urban renewal schemes that bulldozed low-income communities across the country as part of a “slum clearance” initiative.
“Why were they calling these neighborhoods blighted when there was a strong social network in them?” Pyatok asked. Even though the built environment in many of these communities is run-down, Pyatok has observed how much ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy can be tapped if the proper infrastructure is put in place. Arguing that “lower income groups inevitably get the short end of the stick because they are not involved in the decision-making process,” Pyatok provides residents “with lots of options” so they can design buildings that serve their needs and not just the ego and pocketbook of the architect.
As the participatory design process evolved, Pyatok learned that lay people need models to visualize the implications of their options instead of architectural drawings. To this end, he developed model box kits he distributed to residents who came to design workshops. Participants were teamed in groups of eight and given the hands-on experience of cutting up a pieces of foam core material sized to represent (at a 1:20 scale) the building to be constructed in their community. They could cut the material and stack it for greater density or spread it out across the property as a low-rise structure. In the process, they learned that greater density in the design of the living units freed up open space where trees could be planted and children could play. Similarly, they had to make hard choices about whether to give each living unit its own parking spot or collect the cars in parking lots or garages.
Pyatok favors the latter solution because it is more efficient and frees open space. But some of the residents who he works with see their cars as their most valuable assets and want them right next to their house. Asked what he does when residents make less than optimal design choices, Pyatok says that it is his job to guide them to the best design possible but that ultimately the choices are theirs. “It is hard for people to make really dumb choices,” he insists, “because everyone has had the experience of living in a house or an apartment.”
During the workshops, Pyatok saunters from group to group, talking with participants, asking questions, and making suggestions. Finally, each group elects a representative to present their proposed model to the larger group. At this stage in the process, Pyatok draws out the advantages and disadvantages of each model as he steers the gathering toward consensus. Ultimately, he pulls the proposed suggestions together into one vision, taking the best suggestions from each group. In subsequent workshops, residents make decisions about the way in which the living units are laid out, whether or not the apartments can be used as live/work housing, and what the exterior will look like.
Putting the Community into Community Housing
The great advantage of engaging communities in design workshops is that residents feel as if they have some control, says Pyatok. This makes them more willing to see affordable housing built in their community. In affluent and middle-class neighborhoods, proposals to build affordable housing are often greeted with a Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) response because residents worry that their new, lower-income neighbors will degrade the quality-of-life in their neighborhood and lower property values. In working- class and economically distressed communities, there is less resistance to affordable housing but residents must still be approached with respect. Nonprofits that seek to build affordable housing need to find local partners and to secure the backing of community leaders before announcing plans to build, he observes.
Pyatok also uses architecture graduate students to provide communities with free design work. This is a double win, he explains, because students learn to engage residents in the design process while providing them with free services. During an eight-week, summer design workshop he ran from 1988 to 1990, Pyatok assigned students to study underutilized sites near streets served by mass transit in Oakland and asked them to propose plans to develop them. Dozens of potential development sites were identified and Pyatok shopped them around among nonprofit developers.
One site, 15 blocks from Pyatok’s own home in the San Antonio section of East Oakland, stood out. It was located on the heavily trafficked International Boulevard in a mixed-ethnic, working-class neighborhood within walking distance of the Fruitvale BART station. Pyatok argued that the site was ripe for development and that the zoning was already in place for a mid-sized, affordable housing complex. The East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) purchased the property, hired him to be the architect, and joined forces with the neighborhood-based San Antonio Development Corporation. The partnerships resulted in the Hismen Hin’Nu Terrace project.
The Rocky Road to Sun Gate
Katie Davis, director of property management for EBALDC, remembers the Hismen Hin’Nu design workshops well. The project (the name of which means “sun gate” in the language of the Muwekma Ohlone Indians, early inhabitants of the San Antonio district) got off to a rough start.
Some residents argued that the area did not need more affordable housing, while others contended that the local school was already over-crowded. The issue went to the City Council where the proposal for placing 100 units on the property was reduced to 92 units. A deal was brokered where the children of families who moved into the new housing would be bussed to other schools until a new school opened in the neighborhood. Once the project won approval, Pyatok became involved in two sets of design workshops, one for ground-floor commercial development and another for residential development.
“The first meeting I came to I felt hostility,” Davis recalls. People suspected that the developer and architect were going to come in and “push down their throats what they want to see built. You could feel the tension,” she said. But once Pyatok got started, he set a relaxed tone that made people feel included in the decision-making process and their fears subsided, she says. “He told them that he was there to get their input. He could not promise them they would get everything they wanted, but he would try to incorporate some of their desires in the project. And he did,” she observes.
The finished product that emerged from these workshops clearly demonstrates how functional and attractive affordable housing can be built based on design guidance from local residents. At street-level, there’s commercial space, some of which is devoted to a Head Start program. The residential units, comprising the majority of the property, are split into four quadrants. The main entrance passes through an ornamental Sun Gate flanked on either side by two four-story, elevator-served buildings holding 15 one-bedroom and 35 two-bedroom units. The back two quadrants contain 30 three-bedroom and 10 four-bedroom town homes. A tree-lined central courtyard is broken into pleasant plazas. A landscaped second-level courtyard has places for children to play. Two garages are hidden on the bottom floor at the sides of the building.
The complex houses a diverse racial and ethnic mix of residents who speak 17 different languages. To qualify for these apartments, residents’ incomes can be no more than 35 to 55 percent of the area median income. The policy literally opens doors to those who work as child-care workers, maids, janitors, bank clerks, retail employees, and bus drivers — people who have a job but can’t afford a place to live. A three-bedroom apartment rents for $556 to $852 per month — a bargain in the Bay Area. Some welfare recipients are able to pay rents with Section 8 federal housing vouchers.
Pyatok “really has a commitment to low-income people and communities and I think that is why he gets so much work from non-profits,” says Davis. “Not all architects have that. Pyatok has a personality where he can work with community residents. I have been in meetings where community people have been turned off when they think people are talking down to them or disrespecting them. That’s not Mike. He listens to them,” she says.
Steve Lerner, is Research Director at Commonweal in Bolinas. He authored EcoPioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today’s Environmental Problems and the forthcoming Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.
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