June 1, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
When Community Housing Partners, a charity in Christiansburg, Va., purchased the Woods at Yorktown apartment complex in
2001, it recognized that it would take major renovations to make the housing more livable. The buildings, last updated about 20 years earlier, still retained many of the features from the days when they were built as barracks housing in the 1940s for the Naval Weapons Station, in Yorktown.
Colin M. Arnold, the architect who oversaw the renovation, says the buildings had many shortcomings: Nothing marked where one unit stopped and another one began, no place was available for people to gather outside, the vinyl siding was worn and faded, unsightly electrical meters hung prominently near the doors, and the boundaries between the parking and living areas were poorly defined.
“There was nothing green,” says Mr. Arnold, who now heads the Community Design Studio, a design-services company started by Community Housing Partners. “It was kind of a no man’s land between the parking area and the building.”
The addition of front porches helped to visually separate one family’s unit from the next, serve as a transition between public and private space, and provide an area for neighbors to gather. The old vinyl siding was replaced with fiber cement board, which is more durable and takes paint well, allowing the organization to add color. By adding sidewalks, the organization created more-defined areas for walking, parking, and front yards.
Inside, the charity sought to improve the comfort and energy efficiency of the apartments. It added insulation and drywall to what previously were painted concrete-block walls. Windows designed to help prevent heat loss in the winter and heat gain in the summer and new energy-efficient heat pumps were added to reduce energy consumption — and residents’ utility bills.
The renovation wasn’t cheap. The total cost came to $7.4-million, or more than $60,000 per unit. The element of the design that was hardest for the group to adopt was the porches, because the expense was more than the charity was used to spending per unit, says Mr. Arnold. “But in the end,” he says, “they were the most transformative community feature of the project.”
Mr. Arnold says he has seen a real change in attitude among residents. “You see people begin to personalize the space outside their front door, when they actually start claiming some of that front yard,” he says.
The flower gardens, yard art, and flags, he says, are the residents’ way of saying, “You know, this has been set up in such a way that it’s important to me now. It’s not just some place that I pay rent. This is where I make my life.”
