La Casa Permanent Supportive Housing

This publication documents how the Studio Twenty Seven Architecture | Leo A Daly joint venture team designed La Casa to inspire pride and a sense of community membership in its residents. It is a building that leverages the power of spatial autonomy with the context of a secure, supportive environment to encourage the rehabilitation of its residents. Not quite an apartment building, nor a dorm or shelter, La Casa is a new typology for housing the homeless.

Fragment is an episodic publication of Studio Twenty Seven Architecture. Each issue is dedicated to a singular idea, project, or element associated with the Art of Architecture published to foster future dialogues on architecture.

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The notion that La Casa is experienced by its residents as a home, rather than an institution, is crucial to its success as a supportive housing facility. The living units are bright, simple, and efficient. Aperiodic floor-to-ceiling windows give each resident a unique perspective of the busy urbanscape outside. Full kitchens and accessible bathrooms allow residents space to care for themselves. The interior finishes are durable but characteristically domestic – the warm grain of a wood floor, the brightness of colored tile, or the weathered patina of exposed concrete are details that are resonate to human perception.

La Casa is an efficient and sustainable building that does not sacrifice open and active design. At the scale of the street, its facades bend in response to busy sidewalks and shaded pocket parks. Its two-story, fully-glazed lobby provides visual access to the interior, inviting passing community members to engage in the facility’s mission. The building’s regular form and shallow facade are activated by the irregular pattern of windows into the living units. Dark voids during the day and projections of light at night, the windows are framed by layers of cladding in low relief. The energy of Irving Street is imprinted on the facade as a rippling gradient of light, intense at the building core and slowly fading to calm at the building edges.

The Studio Twenty Seven Architecture | Leo A Daly team designed La Casa to inspire pride and a sense of community membership in its residents. It is a building that leverages the power of spatial autonomy with the context of a secure, supportive environment to encourage the rehabilitation of it residents. Not quite an apartment building, nor a dorm or shelter, La Casa is a new typology for housing the homeless.

Homelessness is not one experience – it is a continuum. At its least extreme are people that spend a day or two in the shelter system. At its most extreme are the chronically homeless, people who have been homeless for a long time and suffer from a disabling condition. Almost all instances of homelessness are a response to a deficiency of affordable housing opportunities.

As a Permanent Supportive Housing facility, La Casa is home to people with histories of chronic homelessness as well as the medical and social services that will help them establish independence. La Casa is a Housing First program; there are no sobriety or employment requirements for new tenants. Residents can more effectively combat addiction, find employment, and improve their mental and physical health when provided with a safe, reliable, and autonomous housing condition.

In the mid ‘90s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began encouraging communities to consolidate all efforts to provide housing and service to the homeless under planning bodies called Continuums of Care. CoC’s are a framework to direct cooperation between the federal government, local governments, and private institutions to address all states of homelessness. HUD identified four necessary components of a continuum: a mechanism for identifying victims of homelessness and connecting them to support services; emergency shelters; transitional housing; and permanent supportive housing.

Though the chronic homeless now represent less than 15 percent of the general homeless population, more than half of the funds devoted to fighting all homelessness is used for their care. Emergency services often associated with chronic homelessness – emergency room visits, hospitalizations for medical or psychiatric care, rooms in detoxification facilities or nursing homes, and incarceration – are expensive.

Permanent Supportive Housing is a much more cost effective option. According to a study published in 2009, the average cost of housing and services for a resident at the 1811 Eastlake facility in Seattle was $30,000 less per year than caring for a chronically homeless individual without housing. The savings increased to $36,000 after 12 months in housing. ²  The healthcare costs for residents of a permanent supportive facility called Moore Place in Charlotte, North Carolina fell by $1.8 million annually after they moved in. ³

1. The homeless population in the United States dropped by 11 percent between 2007 and 2014. AHAR 2014, p. 1
2. Mary E Larmier et all, “Healthcare and Public Service Use and Costs Before and After Provision of Housing for Chronically Homeless Persons with Severe Alcohol Problems,” April 1, 2009, The Journal of the American Medical Association, 301(13): 1349-1357
3. Kathleen Miles, “Housing the Homeless Not Only Saves Lives – It’s Actually Cheaper Than Doing Nothing” Huffington Post, March 25, 2014

Even as homelessness is decreasing nationwide, the homeless population in Washington, DC continues to grow. The city’s economy and population are expanding rapidly, largely at the expense of those who depend on affordable housing. The District lost half of its low cost rental housing stock and 72 percent of its low-value homes between 2000 and 2010. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment increased by half, and the median home value nearly doubled. Meanwhile, household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of DC residents did not increase; in 2010, one in five DC households spent more than half of their income on housing.⁴

The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness (TCP), DC’s CoC program, conducts a point-in-time count of the homeless population each January. In 2014, TCP counted nearly 8,000 people spending the night without a home – up 18 percent since 2010.⁵  Of this number, approximately 400 are found on District streets, 6,000 in “low barrier” or emergency shelters, and 1,600 in transitional housing facilities. Half are individuals, half are part of homeless families.

4. “Homelessness in Metropolitan Washington, Results and Analysis from the 2014 Point-in-Time Count of Homeless Persons in the Metropolitan Washington Region,” Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s Homeless Services Planning and Coordinating Committee, May 14, 2014. p. 7

5. Jenny Reed, “Disappearing Act: Affordable Housing in DC is Vanishing Amid Sharply Rising Housing Costs,” May 7, 2012, DC Fiscal Policy Institute

“The greatest barrier to ending homelessness in our communities is the lack of fixed, affordable permanent housing opportunities for the lowest income households.”

“Homelessness in Metropolitan Washington, Results and Analysis from the 2014 Point-in-Time Count of Homeless Persons in the Metropolitan Washington Region,” p. 1

La Casa, which opened in December 2014, is the first facility in the city designed and built ground up as Permanent Supportive Housing. Its carefully orchestrated program is a mix of private and public spaces, maximizing the number of individual living units in the 25,000 square foot building while laying the groundwork for an open, supportive community.

The forty single-occupancy units are designed for efficiency and durability, but also to be easily identified by residents as home. Inspired by more costly studio loft apartments, each dwelling unit provides floor-to-ceiling operable windows for natural daylighting and ventilation. Ninety percent of all interior space has views to the exterior. The units offer functional simplicity, coupling a hybrid living, eating, and kitchen space with a sleeping niche. Warm and durable flooring of exposed concrete and bamboo complements quiet, crisp white walls and a refined gray kitchen.

Collectively, La Casa operates as a community. Communal spaces are interspersed with offices where residents can seek counseling, case management, and employment and housing placement assistance. The finishes in the building’s public spaces – textured ceramic tile, carpet tile, and exposed concrete – prioritize warmth, beauty, and durability. The facility is built to minimize maintenance requirements while feeling like home.

Each living unit is fully handicap accessible, utilizing universal design principals to cater to the 28 percent of program participants who have physical disabilities. All public areas are equipped with power assisted entries and accessible hardware, corridors are well illuminated, and all building signage is tactile.

A home rather than an institution, La Casa is a project that represents a change in the way a city addresses homelessness. It is a blended effort of both architecture and social services to impede the growth of the homeless population.

below:

Typical unit from entrance;
Eating area of a typical unit

La Casa is located in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, DC. It sits among mid-rise residential buildings, street-level restaurants, and a retail complex on Irving Street, just a half-block west of the Columbia Heights station of the DC Metro subway system.

The Metro station is a transportation hub; the surrounding urban infrastructure supports travel by rail, bus, foot, and – owned or shared – cars and bicycles. These multi-modal transportation opportunities allow La Casa tenants to travel easily and conveniently throughout the city, extending their access to city resources and employment possibilities beyond the immediate area.

Because of the City’s need to accommodate as many residents as possible on the site, La Casa’s massing is largely informed by zoning restrictions – its height and the alignment of its primary facades (including the 12-foot setback along Irving Street) are at the maximum allowance. The dimension of the rear courtyard reduces the building mass just enough to achieve the required floor-to-area ratios and provides light and air to the rear facing units.

Yet, as a building symbolic of community action to reconceptualize care of the homeless, La Casa has important urban responsibilities. To ensure that the building is experienced as an integral part of the surrounding neighborhood, the design team made meaningful adjustments to the volume prescribed by the zoning parameters.

A subtle cant of the first levels of the north facade – at the scale of the street – provides a foreground to the entry and relief to the adjacent pocket park. The canted wall folds back, carving the two-story, fully-glazed lobby from the northeast corner of the building mass. The layers of glazing provide visual access to the interior, inviting the gaze of a community that is in fact an important participant in the rehabilitation of the La Casa residents. At night, the transparent lobby is a lantern set within the urban fabric, greeting Columbia Heights residents as they exit the Metro station on their commute home, to run an errand, or to grab a bite to eat.

La Casa’s seven-story height balances the nine-story building facades that face 14th Street and the four and five-story buildings on Irving Street Just as it supports members of the Columbia Heights community in their acclimation to the modern housing economy, the building is a physical link between the historic fabric of Columbia Heights and the new development at its center.

COLUMBIA HEIGHTS

Columbia Heights was an early suburb of DC, located just north of the city’s original northern boundary at Florida Avenue. It was named for Columbian College, founded near Meridian Hill Park in 1822, which was renamed George Washington University and relocated to downtown DC in 1912.

Supported by streetcars that connected the neighborhood to downtown DC along 16th, 14th and 11th Streets NW, Columbia Heights thrived. Large apartment buildings and blocks of row houses built in the early 20th century added an urban character to the once suburban landscape. The Tivoli Theater, an ornate cinema, and The Arcade, an entertainment center, anchored the neighborhood’s central commercial corridor along 14th Street NW.

Columbia Heights has always been diverse, but not always integrated. 13th Street NW was the neighborhood’s unofficial racial divide into the 1930s, until the booming black middle class community spilled west as white residents moved to suburbs further from the city. The all-white Central High School, at the neighborhood’s southeast corner, closed in 1940 due to low enrollment. By the time the all-black Cardozo High School moved into the building in 1950, Columbia Heights was predominately black.

Hard times hit the neighborhood, known also as Cardozo, in the 60s. In 1960, 25 percent of the city’s welfare recipients lived within the Cardozo school district. The 14th Street commercial corridor was largely destroyed in the riots that swept DC following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Damage to property in Columbia Heights was valued at (in 2015 dollars) $44.9 million. After the riots, the city bulldozed 70 acres of land in the neighborhood – including 4,000 homes and 270 of the 320 businesses along 14th Street – hoping in vain to attract new development. Instead, residents continued to move to the suburbs, leaving even more property vacant; those that stayed faced soaring rates of poverty and crime.  ²

2. Kraft 2010, 253

In the subsequent decades, a largely-immigrant Hispanic population moved into the neighborhood, blurring racial divides between white and black. La Casa (Spanish for the house) was established on Irving Street in 1985; it originally operated as both a traditional low-barrier emergency shelter and transitional housing facility for both English- and Spanish-speaking homeless men. A one-story brick structure and five construction trailers were lined with bunk beds, housing 130 men overnight.

In the wake of a severe District-wide economic crisis in the mid-‘90s, the city chartered the National Capital Revitalization Corporation (NCRC) to manage and develop District-owned property in underserved and emerging neighborhoods. The city also used Federal funding to expand its Metro system to struggling areas of the city. The Columbia Heights station, located a half-block from La Casa at 14th and Irving Street, opened in 1999. The new Metro station helped the NCRC to attract large-scale development surrounding La Casa, including the DC USA complex – urbanized big-box retail – and several residential buildings.

In 2002, a subsidiary of the NCRC chose Bethesda-based Donatelli Development to build a mixed-use complex on the southwest corner of 14th and Irving Streets, including the land occupied by La Casa. In 2004, the corporation requested that Donatelli’s plans be augmented to include a single room occupancy facility to replace the existing shelter. The developer and city filed a joint application to the zoning commission requesting the creation of a Planned Development Unit – La Casa’s original site was partially zoned for residential development (R-5-B); the entire PUD would be rezoned as commercial (C-3-A) to accommodate the dense program.

The first phase of the Highland Park development, a 229-unit structure between La Casa and the Metro station’s western entrance, opened in 2008. The original La Casa shelter closed its doors in October of 2010 – its residents relocated to other facilities or placed in scattered-site supportive housing – and construction began on the 144-unit Highland Park addition.

La Casa, which became a permanent supportive housing facility rather than a single room occupancy shelter to take advantage of federal CoC funding, opened its doors to forty residents in December 2014.

“They’re just pushing people further and further away from the business corridor… In my head the rationale is ‘out of sight and out of mind.’ If you don’t see poor people, you don’t know poor people exist. If you don’t see homeless people in your community, you assume that they don’t exist.”

Brian Anders
homeless advocate and member of CCNV & Empower DC
in Pete Tucker, “La Casa Shelter To Close,”
October 13, 2010, TheFightBack.org

In 2010, Columbia Heights was 40.7 percent black, 26.6 percent white, and 27.7 percent Hispanic. In 1990, the same census tracts were 75.1 percent black, 3.7 percent white, and 19.4 percent Hispanic. ³

Between 2000 and 2010, the 20010 zip code (the north half of Columbia Heights, with parts of the adjacent Mt. Pleasant and Park View neighborhoods) had the 14th largest increase in the share of the white population in the country.   ⁴   Home values in the neighborhood have almost quadrupled.   ⁵

The forces of gentrification are pushing Columbia Heights residents dependent on low-value housing to other areas of the city. As the last public men’s shelter in Ward 1, La Casa stands against the use of new development to ostracize people who have long called Columbia Heights their home.

It is a building that fits into the neighborhood in a way that is not stigmatized. It is a service central to the community of Columbia Heights, rather than an institution set on its periphery. The chronic homeless are no longer outcasts, seen by passerby as outsiders without hope or home – they are neighbors.

3. Census data from neighborhoodinfodc.org

4. Michael J. Petrilli, “The fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in the United States.” July 11, 2012, Flypaper, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

5. Census data from neighborhoodinfodc.org

La Casa fosters individualized identity within the context of collective housing.

There are five different living unit layouts – though each unit has the same amount of glazing, the pattern of fenestration is unique for each. From Irving Street or the rear courtyard, residents can easily identify their particular floor and unit; their place in the world.

The building’s envelope is pushed to zoning allowances to maximize programmed space within. The primary facade faces north, so the interplay of light, shade, and shadow is limited. To mediate this flatness, the design team employed the windows into each unit as darkened voids in the daytime and illuminated beacons in the evenings.

The syncopated rhythm of the exterior cladding blends the fixed form of the urban skyline with the activity of the city street – La Casa is a fixed, reliable presence, but is nonetheless absorbed in the life and movement of the city that surrounds it. In low-relief, the gray cement board frames the building mass, heaviest where the building meets adjacent structures and over the Irving Street entrance. If the cement board is the frame, the woodgrain Trespa panels are the framing mat, a plane against which the windows alternate between void and light-images. The light energy is most intense at the building’s core, a representation of the active community of residents within.

The Rain Screen

The facade is designed to be a medium by which the residents of La Casa relate to the surrounding community. Likewise, the facade is a mechanism that mediates between exterior and interior conditions.

La Casa is designed to a US Green Building Council LEED Gold standard – it was important that its external walls be highly efficient thermal barriers. To maximize the building’s energy performance, the exterior wall assembly was carefully composed to prevent the movement of unconditioned air in or conditioned air out. The airtight wall assembly had to be able to handle the inevitable weeping of water through its exterior layers – without air moving through the wall to dry it, moisture could get trapped and cause extensive damage.

The exterior wall assembly takes a layered approach to sealing the interior against air and water filtration. Instead of depending on a single barrier, the cladding is a rain screen that prevents the majority of moisture from reaching the primary wall assembly; the primary wall assembly is protected by continuous air barriers both inside and out.

Rain screens are a type of cavity wall assembly. The dimension of the furring that supports the exterior cladding – at La Casa, concrete board or paper-in-epoxy-resin panels – creates a small, continuous cavity. The positive pressure of wind on the facade creates negative pressure within the cavity. This pressure difference equalizes at the open joints between the panels, creating a continuous flow of air that prevents 90 percent of all water from moving past the cladding layer.

(top) Ground floor slab is poured, 7/9/13;   Workers prepare to pour the fourth floor slab, 8/20/2013

(top) The seventh floor slab is poured, 10/08/2013; (bottom) The primary exterior wall framing system is in place, 12/10/2013.

(below) The windows and fluid applied air barrier are in place, the building is “closed in” and work on interior finishes and systems can begin, 04/02/2014; (bottom) Construction is complete, 9/26/2014

Most of the remaining moisture drains down the vapor-permeable air barrier that faces the back of the cavity; the small fraction that weeps through the wall condenses within the wall and exfiltrates back through the air barrier. The rain screen system extends the life expectancy of the entire wall assembly.

Exterior to the building structure, a fluid-applied membrane air barrier, sheathing, and 2-inch rigid insulation create a continuous and insulated building envelope. All wall penetrations – such as the structural ties that support the cladding system, windows and doors, control and expansion joints, or piping – are designed with thermal breaks or faced with material to prevent thermal transmission, carefully flashed, and/or sealed by the membrane air barrier. All windows are low-E coated insulated glass to limit solar heat gain.

Additional insulation in the primary wall framing system, which is set within the building structure, proves a supplemental insulated envelope. The insulation is faced with a vapor-retarder membrane to protect the assembly from humid air inside the building. Once the windows, window flashing, and exterior air barrier are in place, the building is “closed in” – interior finishes and systems can be installed at the same time as the exterior rain screen assembly.

Though the rain screen cladding assembly requires extensive coordination – a number of different subcontractors are responsible for the delivery and installation of the assembly’s different components – it is a highly effective way to build an energy efficient and watertight exterior building envelope.