High Plains, High Concept

The green home of the future may not include moving sidewalks, a robot maid, or a levitating doggy treadmill a la The Jetsons. But a new house designed by the federal Housing and Urban Development department does include moveable walls, soybean insulation, and pervious concrete. These days there are green housing projects—and increasingly, green affordable housing projects—in progress at sites all over the country. But this one rolled out in an unlikely spot: Omaha, Nebraska, a city of less than 500,000 people in the middle of the country. “We figure, if it can work in Omaha, it can work anywhere,” says HUD’s David Engel, director of its Affordable Housing Research and Technology office. In fact, this spring, an area north of Omaha’s downtown has proved ideal for just such an affordable housing experiment.

North Omaha, where Malcolm X was born in 1925, is comprised of several neighborhoods that struggled for decades with crime and disinvestment. The decline accelerated in the 1970s after construction of the North Omaha freeway, which slices through neighborhoods. Many homes and offices were abandoned, and crime rose. According to James Thele, Omaha’s assistant planning director for community development, the city turned its attention and resources back to North Omaha around ten years ago. In 1998, it tore down a 400-unit public housing complex to create a business park and began working with developers on infill housing.

Also around 1998, HUD organized the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), a collaboration between private builders and HUD’s office of Policy Development & Research. In 2004 a PATH team started hashing out a design for a high-quality concept home with a flexible floor plan that could be built in around twenty days. Argentinian builder Fernando Pages Ruiz was part of this team. Ruiz was born in Buenos Aires and had lived in New York and L.A., but in 1992, he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he found it easy to both raise a family and take on large, ambitious building projects. “People paid full prices for houses, and I didn’t meet anyone who had been sued,” he quips.

Ruiz’s most notable development in the area is Liberty Village, a cluster of affordable single-family homes in Lincoln that house immigrant families from all over the world. Ruiz modified the designs of each living space to fit the social and cultural needs of each family. A Vietnamese family turned a garage into a second cooking space. A Muslim family created a separate space for men and women guests in their living room.

In 2005, HUD chose Ruiz, president of Brighton Construction in Lincoln, to build the agency’s first concept PATH home in Omaha. Moveable walls are by far the home’s coolest feature. Taking its cues from office space, all the utilities are located in the floorboards, meaning interior walls can slide in and out of place like a cubicle’s walls. A family can easily add another bedroom when a new child is born, expand the living room when teenagers have friends over, or add an elevator or bedroom when grandma moves in.

The home’s graywater recycling system raised eyebrows at first among the city of Omaha’s code enforcers. Water from showers, baths, and laundry is sent to the basement where it’s treated aerobically and with UV lights. Then it makes one more cycle through the house, pouring back into toilets, washing machines, and the garden hose. “You’re doing your own water treatment on site, which is a great environmental benefit, but cities are approaching it slowly and skeptically. What happens if someone drinks out of the hose or something?” says Ruiz. “Some of the concerns are legitimate, but there’s a lot of use of this kind of system in Europe and Asia. People are getting used to it.”

The price for all this, around $150,000, may sound high for an affordable housing product, but not one with these kinds of bells and whistles. HUD says the house is aimed at moderate-income families—perhaps immigrants and other working families looking for long-term, suburban-style living at a lower price. HUD plans to use the Omaha house as a model for affordable development in the Gulf Coast region, and it will roll out homes in other areas of the country by next year.