Breaking Ground
Michael Binette, Senior Partner + Managing Principal, The Architectural Team
By Darryl Hicks
11 min read
Current Issues, Trends and Relationships Between Architects and Affordable Housing Developers
Michael Binette is an award-winning architect who has been designing affordable housing for 40 years.
Binette has spent his entire career at The Architectural Team (TAT), a Chelsea, MA-based firm that operates in 30 states but has a strong presence in New England; Washington, DC; New Jersey; and Florida.
The firm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021 and is widely known as a national advocate for affordable housing, historic preservation and adaptive reuse, sustainability and resilient waterfront development.
As senior partner and managing principal, Binette is involved in all facets of design – from facility space programming, design and planning through construction administration.
Tax Credit Advisor sat down with Binette to discuss current issues and trends and how the relationship between architects and affordable housing developers has evolved over the past year.
Tax Credit Advisor: What noteworthy trends have you seen so far in 2022?
Michael Binette: Despite the world’s many issues, from the pandemic to war to supply chain delays, TAT and other firms that design multifamily housing have stayed remarkably healthy and busy. There are some clear trends that came out of the pandemic over the last two years and things that were already underway became accelerated by the pandemic. One is the push toward greater sustainability. Because they tend to hold on to their properties, affordable housing developers have a longer-term view. Their ability to look at sustainability differently than just from an initial cost perspective has really pushed sustainable design to the forefront. That trend was happening, and it was accelerated by COVID. It’s very much a compartmentalized approach to construction where units are segregated to themselves. It provides a much healthier environment and reduces cross contamination. There’s also a greater focus on resident services as opposed to putting a roof over someone’s head. It’s about helping residents get through their life issues and stresses – services such as work programs and health resources and information. And finally on the design and construction side, there has been a real need to expedite schedules. Getting designs done more efficiently, getting construction done more quickly, just to mitigate escalating costs. It puts a lot more pressure on everybody but, in many ways, it’s good, because it forces people to work together.
TCA: How has the relationship between architects and affordable housing developers evolved pre-pandemic to now? Are there any efficiencies that came out of COVID that caught on in terms of designing new housing?
MB: We are a very client-centric firm and we, like them, take a long-term view of things in how we approach our business and our client relationships. It was natural for us to be well-equipped to deal with the turbulence brought on by COVID. In general, it has deepened relationships and forced people to work together much more hand-in-glove, not just clients and architects, but also the contractors. Again, the biggest goal is to get these developments underway as quickly as possible to mitigate the inevitable cost spikes that have been happening. Time is our most precious commodity. It’s much more serious because our clients are forced to take on greater risk earlier than they would have ordinarily. It’s a much more compressed design schedule. For example, we used to do a schematic set of plans and elevations for a building and that would be used for the submission of tax credit awards. Now the state funding agencies are much more intent on funding projects that are ready to proceed and show a clear sign of readiness. This means they’re putting more pressure on developers to take their drawings much farther along, so our clients must invest more money in the development plan specifications to, let’s say, 70 to 80 percent as opposed to ten percent before they’re funded. That certainly catches everybody’s attention and keeps everybody very, very focused. It has improved decision making an awful lot and increased people’s focus on what we need to solve for. Our biggest job is compiling the necessary information for a client to make the best decision possible with an eye towards moving things along more quickly and that inherently makes things more efficient. People don’t lollygag. There’s less of a tendency to make changes. It requires the general contractor to be brought to the table early on, so that he’s a part of the real-time pricing exercise as plans are being developed as opposed to finishing up a set of construction documents that are 25 percent over budget. We have direct contractor feedback from the folks who are really on the line buying every day and dealing with supply chain issues in real time.
TCA: How have you adapted to the supply chain challenges? Are you recommending new building materials or design strategies to compensate for escalating costs or delivery delays?
MB: It gets back to the emphasis on early planning. When lumber prices were high, it made sense to design a wood frame building utilizing metal studs for nonbearing partitions inside versus keeping the whole building as a wood frame. Not to the point where you would do a whole metal stud building, but if you could panelize a wood frame building, for example, for the bearing walls, you could get the shell enclosed very quickly. That allows you to do all the other trades, while you’re catching up with the metal stud partitions within the unit. Otherwise, it would take you longer to get the shell of the building enclosed, which would then push back some of the other scheduled trades. Getting back to the supply chain challenges, one of the issues for architects has been the time constraints and need to order supplies much more quickly. The burden on the construction and design teams is really to get products and building components approved early on in a extremely compressed schedule. Previously, we had four months to review and approve all the components that went into a project—every stud submittal, drywall type, color and paint type, window type—but now architects are being pushed to do it in 30 days, which is a huge compression.
TCA: Has that been a big challenge?
MB: We’re adapting to it by necessity. The good thing is it keeps everybody playing in the sandbox well together.
TCA: TCA interviewed you in October 2019 about an assisted living project you designed called Evergreen Village that used Medicaid subsidies to pay for residents’ care services. It was a very innovative project at the time. I am wondering if the use of Medicaid subsidies has caught on in other states like you hoped it would.
MB: Unfortunately, not. When we spoke last it was more of a care-oriented service that was being provided by Medicaid subsidies. That has not taken off to the point we had hoped, where the various states would provide these Medicaid waivers to allow those services to be funded for the care side of assisted living. The senior market has been very busy but more so on the market-rate side and not the affordable side. Our residential clients, the ones that are just doing traditional senior independent living without a care model, do coordinate resident services by helping people with day-to-day stuff, but again, we haven’t seen a lot of progress on getting access to funding to provide affordable health-related care.
TCA: Do you see the role of federal and state governments changing over time to resolve the housing crisis? No matter how much funding is provided, it doesn’t seem to be working.
MB: I wouldn’t say it’s not working. It really speaks to the surging demand for affordable housing and the income divide in this country. Housing prices are through the roof. Getting into a home is impossible for many people. There’s simply too much demand for affordable housing.
Over the last 20 years, the federal government and the state governments have leveraged the talents and efficiencies of the private sector. They incentivized the private sector to do a lot of what in the 40s and 50s had been done by the federal government. The private sector does things more efficiently and better because they’re nimbler. It’s interesting, because you could double the tax credit allotment. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit is a net positive revenue generator for the government, so there’s no reason not to be doing it given the need for affordable housing and the fact that it’s not ultimately costing the taxpayer’s money. The housing that’s being developed now works. The private sector is well equipped to provide high quality affordable housing that doesn’t look like 50-year-old affordable housing stock. One of the ways that state and local governments could further help is by streamlining entitlements and zoning approvals. People in general don’t like change, so getting a zoning approval can be a year-and-a-half to two-year process. That’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of investment, a lot of risk for a developer to be undertaking. Governor Baker in Massachusetts has really been at the forefront of streamlining some of that process, for example, by allowing zoning approvals to happen by a simple majority vote, as opposed to a two-thirds majority.
TCA: How do you see the role of architecture changing over the next five years to achieve better housing results?
MB: Better housing results can mean a lot of things. One of them is creating healthier homes and pushing for higher levels of sustainability to address the importance of climate change. Architects must be at the forefront of incorporating the latest sustainable building practices into building designs if we have any shot at helping that situation and helping our construction partners understand the benefits of green building strategies. This means continuing to pursue LEED certifications as well as emerging accreditations, like WELL and Fitwel, while also pushing for the use of specific building approaches, such as Passive House, resilient design and specific kinds of systems, for instance fully electrified multifamily properties. The construction world of multifamily housing has a wide range of levels of sophistication. We’ve got some very sophisticated billion-dollar-a-year companies but also many smaller, capable firms that are “Mom and Pop” operations that haven’t fully embraced more sustainable building and design practices. The main focus for architects is to build communities through good design. The days of cookie cutter suburban apartment developments should be gone, with more focus provided on internal and external community-driven solutions to enhance social interaction. For example, there are older senior projects that were designed as duplexes or separate buildings where you couldn’t gather with your friends very easily. Here in the Northeast, you’re not going to visit your friend in a building next door if it’s 20 degrees outside. There needs to continue to be a greater focus on the end users rather than just providing a roof over someone’s head.
TCA: The Architectural Team celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. What distinguishes TAT from other architectural firms?
MB: It might sound a little cliche but it’s our team. Forty percent of the people who work here have been with us for at least ten years and some up to 30 or more years. That level of tenure brings a huge breadth and depth of experience. Once a client works with one of our senior team that’s who they want on all their jobs going forward.
TCA: Thank you for your time. What’s your favorite project from 2022? What makes it so special?
MB: A big transition in the preservation of affordable housing is the privatization of public housing developments across the country. New York City happens to have 17 percent of the total public housing units in the whole country. We were recently awarded the New York City Housing Authority’s Fulton and Chelsea Elliot developments with Essence Development/Related Companies. We’re redeveloping 2,000 units in 18 buildings. It’s not only an opportunity to transform two city blocks in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York but also to completely renovate the homes of over 2,000 families, including the addition of a super high-energy retrofit of the façade. In our minds, it’s going to be truly transformative.
