The Grass Roots Housing Process

How to make TRUE low cost housing: An early paper whose lessons have not yet been absorbed or understood!

(By Christopher Alexander)

In 1973, I aimed to create housing at a fraction of the cost which housing had at that time. My students and I determined very early, that the cost of housing, lies 1/3 in the structure, and 2/3 in the mortgage and interest. It is all-but useless to try and reduce the cost by lowering the cost of doors, or roof, or windows — though they seem big, they are tiny. Compared with the accumulated cost of interest over time, none of these physical cost reductions really alters the cost of housing. If you want to change the real cost of housing, you must address the cost of interest over its life span, modify the lifetime cost of this interest or, if possible, remove the cost of interest altogether.

In 1973 I began to open up two themes that were to become the core of my thought in later years.

One, the process of production as the key of architecture, its roots in human process and the wholesale transformation of social processes which it requires.

Two, the construction process, independent of architects and contractors as separate entities, but instead carried out by a single unified process in which design and construction are completely interwoven.

In the overall production process at the scale of towns, perhaps the most significant thing I did during this period was a project in which my students and I examined the way that a town like Berkeley might regenerate itself, by diverting 10% of the city's tax base to direct action in neighborhoods, through small grants, highly decentralized, giving people the money to transform the streets, neighborhoods houses.

Another large scale production process, also invented for the first time during this period, was the grass-roots housing process, a process by which the natural flow of money in the environment, can create the environment directly and slowly, without huge portions being siphoned off in the form of profits or interest on investment.

These two large-scale processes aimed at the overall form of city and neighborhood, were mirrored at the small scale of building, with small scale emphasis on construction, with my attempt to invent a more natural process of construction, and the way that an intimate local building process could transform buildings, rooms, gardens.