#5: Designing Systems Interventions
A reflection on our approach to designing an ecology of interventions to address the wicked problem of a lack of affordable housing, in Pittsburgh, PA.
By Team Emergence: Tomar Pierson-Brown, Joe Nangle, Janice Lyu, Bingjie Sheng
Strategies that respond to change as a systemic process of evolution from an undesirable to a desirable state are essential to truly address complex wicked problems. During the Spring of 2021, Team Emergence engaged in a semester-long effort to apply Transition Design as a strategy for addressing the wicked problem of a lack of affordable housing in Pittsburgh, PA. Transition Design is a practice involving the use of a constellation of problem- and solution-defining frameworks that support the development of systems-level change. Rather than problem-solve through a series of one-off solutions carried out within relatively short timeframes, Transition Design supports the development of “ecologies of systems interventions” implemented at multiple levels of scale, over short-, mid- and long-term time horizons. The feedback these interventions generate connects them to each other, as well as to the emergent behaviors and narratives they support.
This post, the last of our five-part series, discusses the initiatives we propose to catalyze Pittsburgh’s evolution from a city that lacks affordable housing to one that offers residents a choice of economically accessible dwellings. Our ten initiatives work together in cyclical and serial feedback loops to address the problem of a lack of affordable housing in ways that acknowledge the issue’s complexity. Taken individually, each intervention can be regarded as a good idea likely to find traction within our current reality. When taken as a program of systems interventions, they have the collective leverage to disrupt the current resource, mindset, and power dynamics that have made a lack of affordable housing a longstanding and change-resistant phenomenon. We open with a summary of the needs and satisfaction the wicked problem of affordable housing requires, as surfaced through the Transition Design approach. We recount our intervention design process, then explain our interventions in terms of their materiality, whose needs they satisfy, and the sequence in which they should be pursued. Next, we discuss the emergent outcomes of our solution ecology, describing the narratives our strategy creates and changes. Finally, we describe the leverage points our interventions target, to explain the paradigm shift this program has been designed to trigger across stakeholder groups. This post concludes with brief reflections on employing the Transition Design process.
Needs related to affordable housing and the satisfaction our interventions provide
Earlier stages of the Transition Design process informed our understanding of the needs related to affordable housing. First, we mapped the wicked problem to visualize the interconnections between the lack of affordable housing and the five STEEP (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, and Political) domains.
This process revealed that the elements needed to make housing affordable stem from multiple domains. For example, a living wage is needed in order to make housing in a particular region affordable for local workers. The political will necessary for passing a law to raise wages is tied to and limited by interests in increasing business profits. This economic position is further tied to social issues which pit the needs of the poor against the popular narratives of self-determination and rugged individualism.
Next, we mapped the relationships between three key-stakeholders to the problem: single mothers, private development corporations, and city council members. This process surfaced the need to reduce the stigma associated with subsidized housing options, as well as the need to strike a balance between the interests of both powerful and disenfranchised constituents. Their interconnected hopes and fears surfaced the importance of solutions that promote cooperation and mutual benefit.
Next, we took a wide-angle lens to the lack of affordable housing by mapping how the wicked problem has evolved over time. This history demonstrates that a combination of both innovative, “niche level” interventions and “landscape level” paradigm shifts are responsible for maintaining and disrupting the status quo. Strategies for meeting needs related to affordable housing must be situated at both planes.
Finally, we created two maps that prepared our team to design for transitions. This process involved visioning to develop different facets of a long-term future in which the lack of affordable housing is resolved. It also involved “backcasting”, or working backward from our future vision, to understand what present-day elements must be phased out, what elements should be kept, and what elements of a future in which housing is affordable are already available. Our maps highlighted that a range of sustainable, needle-pushing interventions are needed throughout the pathway toward our desired future.
The affordable housing needs we identified track with at least five of economist Manfred Max-Neef’s ten human needs. The ability to afford housing is a matter of subsistence, and the ability to choose from among housing options represents a type of freedom. The capacity to afford safe and stable housing is a matter of protection. Removing the stigma around “affordable” housing meets the human need for understanding, as the type of housing one occupies is a matter of identity. According to Max-Neef’s theory, true satisfaction of such basic needs comes from synergistic satisfiers. This means that our ecology of interventions can only sustainably address the lack of affordable housing if they simultaneously address a specific related need while contributing to the resolution of other interconnected needs. By effectively engaging Transition Design, Team Emergence created a master strategy for addressing a complex adaptive systemic problem by ensuring that each initiative is both situated at the intersection of a structural and lifestyle domain and positioned to reinforce the outcome of at least one other problem-solving approach.
Process Recap
In order to develop the ten interventions mapped in our matrix, our team engaged in deep discussions throughout and had to iterate the matrix several times.
We each identified one narrative, a total of four, that we felt was crucial to initiate a change or disrupt the barriers in the current system to address the wicked problem of lack of affordable housing:
- Breaking down affordable housing stigma
- Universal Basic Income (UBI)
- Environmentally friendly housing construction
- Housing as a public health issue and an important determinant for good health
We decided to develop one matrix with multiple projects for each of these narratives and to come together as a team to see what connections emerged. During this process, we asked ourselves to identify at what level these interventions were being implemented, whether the interventions were material or non-material, if feedback was immediate or took time, and what positive or negative feedback loop(s) it introduced in the current system.
When we got together, we quickly realized that while some interventions connected at particular points, some interventions clashed and mitigated each other’s efforts. We felt that it did not truly feel like a “synergistic solution.” At the same time, we also realized that some of the concepts we developed still felt more like “mini-visions” or aspirations, rather than true interventions. Coming from Assignment #4, the long future vision, our minds were still in a more visionary state, instead of being more grounded and tangible. This initiated another round of discussion as a team to see how we could pivot.
In our second attempt, we decided to focus on one unified narrative. Upon discussion, our team agreed that the narrative we wanted to start with and branch out from is that housing should be and is recognized as a public health issue. From there, we asked, “How do we get to that point? Are there any policy changes that need to happen? Any social campaign or promotion to shift people’s mindset? What about economic interventions that can drive the shift?” These discussions helped our team identify which interventions we should keep and discard. This helped our matrix become tighter and better-connected. Another consideration which was not done initially, was to see what concepts were implemented today and how we might further leverage them. We researched analogous projects and made sure the interventions had close ties with current efforts. This ensured that our interventions would be acceptable in today’s reality.
Through this process, we developed ten solid and well-connected interventions. For the final iteration, we combed through the matrix several times to make additional connections. We began to ask ourselves whether the interventions were initiating positive or negative feedback loops and also rearranged them to the level of scale that they impacted the most. And lastly, since no one intervention is solely material or immaterial; but rather, contains intertwined elements of both, we decided to represent how material or non-material the interventions were through opacity (with more material solutions appearing more opaque). Below, we explain each intervention in terms of upsides and risks, and how we imagine them interplaying with one another.
Timelines & Sequencing of the Interventions
In order for interventions to be sustainable and have a long-term effect, they must be synergistic and implemented over an extended time horizon. We propose the following timeline and sequence.
First are the American Medical Association (AMA) curriculum and Medicaid reconstruction in conjunction with the extension of monthly tax credits first established as COVID-19 relief.
I order for housing to be prioritized as a public health issue, change needs to start at the educational systems-level where doctors are trained to prioritize, ask, and educate patients about how important quality housing is for good health. AMA curriculum and Medicaid reconstruction will hopefully have a trickle-down effect where conversations are generated and push change in perception in patients about housing. We also hope that this will promote more doctors to study the effect of housing, develop interventions, and then evaluate them, leading to more papers and publications. These publications can provide further evidence and advocate for affordable housing. In addition to this, we believe that the monthly tax credit will be vital to kick off later interventions to come. With the on-going COVID-19 stimulus check, there would be leverage to extend monthly tax credits so that people and the government become familiar with the notion of receiving and giving monthly checks, respectively.
The next set of interventions to follow would be the Building Code Reform and a series of social campaigns and community programs. Fueled by the integration of housing as an important social determinant of health, we expect these interventions to demonstrate the need to improve the physical and social aspects of housing and community.
Reforming building code approaches the problem through the physical lens, pushing for environmentally sound buildings, emphasis on reducing the environmental impact of construction, and mandating construction to use responsibly-sourced materials that will ultimately improve the safety of physical living spaces. This will connect to the Pittsburgh Affordable Housing Upgrade Initiative and eventually the 3D printing partnership. In order for these interventions to take off, the government would need to provide accessory zoning legislation and property tax exemptions at the same time for all of them to have synergistic effects.
The series of social campaigns will be implemented simultaneously with the Building Code Reform. With increased awareness about the correlation between health and housing, we expect the #iloveaffordable campaign and community integration program to meet social programs that promote low-cost & co-living styles and the opportunity to build community engagement. As these social campaigns promote a market where housing is more sustainable and affordable, we envision a positive feedback loop between the interventions where these new innovative designs further promote sustainable living and the desire for sustainable living creates a market for diverse, innovative, and green designs.
Lastly, the intervention that will require build up over a longer period is the Smart City Database. This intervention is not only at the Planet level but it requires re-designing city infrastructure to integrate advanced technology to collect data and will require community buy-in and time to co-design together for the technology to be truly integrated. There will also be time to iron out the policies around data ownership as well as privacy and security — a complex, ongoing discussion.
Interventions, Upsides, and Risks
Although just 10 potential interventions are presented in our map, a great deal of thought was given to how each would impact the wicked problem of housing affordability in Pittsburgh.
Approaching the map, several layers of information have been encoded using different methods.
- Reading along the X-axis, the scale of the intervention, ranging from the household level to the planetary level.
- Reading along the Y-axis or by color, the nature of the intervention, whether environmental (green), social (orange), economic/business (red), policy/governance/legal (teal), and infrastructure/technology/scientific (purple).
- Opacity, with more opaque boxes indicative of more material solutions.
- Emoji to connect individual interventions with broader “emergent outcomes” (more below) that will accelerate the solution of the wicked problem.
- Arrows connecting individual interventions depict both positive (black) and negative (red) relationships between proposed interventions.
To better understand how to read the map, let’s dive more deeply into the intervention at the center of the map, a partnership between JJ Gumberg, one of Pittsburgh’s largest private developers; MightyBuildings, a 3D home-printing startup; and New Story, a non-profit accelerating the adoption of 3D printed communities. In this proposed partnership, New Story and MightyBuildings would help JJ Gumberg rapidly adopt 3D home printing technologies that would reduce new construction costs, both in terms of materials and labor hours (up to 95%!), in aims to reach a target of 25% of new construction through 3D printing by 2025.
What can the map tell us about this intervention? First, we locate it on the map, and see that it is nearly solid red, indicating a very material business intervention. It is situated at the City level, since JJ Gumberg focuses its development in Pittsburgh. We also see a money emoji, indicating that its likely outcome is an increase in affordability of housing in Pittsburgh — we envision the benefits of reduced construction costs being shared between JJ Gumberg and buyers of these affordable units. Moving to the connections, we see a black line indicating the positive relationship between this intervention and proposed property tax exemptions that would increase the desirability of developing underutilized sites. As 3D home printing makes new construction more rapid, viable, and affordable, we foresee sites that have languished becoming appealing sites for new construction. There’s also a positive relationship stemming from another initiative, a program aiming to improve the performance and livability of existing housing stock, perhaps through 3D printed renovations.
Taking this approach with each intervention, we hope you’ll see how these interrelated changes coalesce to make a meaningful impact on the affordability of housing in Pittsburgh. While each proposal offers its own direct benefits, the largely reinforcing feedback loops create significant synergies in bringing about three emergent outcomes that we believe will shift the landscape of this wicked problem: housing increasingly being perceived as a public health issue worth solving, a reduction in stigma around subsidized dwellings, resource sharing, and co-living, and an influx of affordable housing options in the market.
If we look at the results of our map from the perspective of one of the stakeholders identified in Assignment #2, single mother households, it’s easy to imagine the direct benefits such households might experience as these three changes take hold. With a monthly tax credit supporting her, and a number of high-quality, affordable options available for rent, Jane Doe could not only secure a better place to live, but perhaps more importantly, feel at home and part of a community once she moves in. No longer sharing a room with her crying son, Jane gets better sleep and thrives at the job she secured with help from the Community Integration Program. Instead of feeling ridiculed when she walks into her building, she is embraced by a supportive community, and even takes a moment to post a selfie with the #iloveaffordable hashtag. This is the Pittsburgh we imagine — one that will pave the way for other cities to follow suit.
While we are excited and hopeful about the positive results our interventions may bring, we are also cautious about potential risks the interventions may cause. One of our strongest arguments about wrestling with the wicked problem of affordable housing is changing society’s stigma towards these houses, so we are interested in bringing a series of social movements to help create a new narrative for living in affordable housing. The #iloveaffordable social media campaign is intended to invite influencers to experience affordable housing in different communities and let them highlight the benefits of low-cost or co-living lifestyles. This helps link affordable housing more to sustainability than to poverty. However, we recognized that this may also cause potential unaffordability of housing. Because in reality, media promotion is still a means of using capital, and although it’s not our intent, a commodity like housing is still responsive to increases in demand.
Another risk we would like to point out is that of more gentrification of our city. In addition to changing the stigmatization of affordable housing, we believe that another main task is to actually improve the quality of affordable housing, and thus the quality of public health in the city as a whole. The renovation of existing affordable housing or new affordable housing to be built under the guidance of more environmentally friendly standards will heavily depend on the data of the Smart City Database in our proposal. But relying on data can lead to decision-makers making decisions without offsite, producing homogenized results ill-suited to individual sites. Although the database approach gives stakeholders abundant evidence to make a choice, we feel that this may hurt the community locality since the data may point to a one-size-fits-all solution, which could ultimately have a negative impact on the diversity of the city.
These risks must be considered, because in reality, any decision has varying degrees of compromise and uncontrollability, and rather than expecting a static “perfect” solution, it is more practical to clearly understand the risks and then make adjustments as we are making progress all the way towards our desired future.
Emergent Outcomes
Three emergent outcomes are expected to come from our ecology of interventions. More options in the housing market become affordable through the feedback between extended monthly tax credits, zoning and tax exemptions, and political conditions that support innovative private collaborations. These synergies are meant to promote the development of environmentally sound, aesthetically pleasing, unit dense housing units. Increasing household incomes through tax exemptions makes the idea of regular government subsidies for more than just the disabled and the very poor politically popular. This change in mindset primes the electorate to approve of and vote for candidates committed to establishing a universal basic income. Such income is integral to our desired future in which every person has access to housing they can afford.
In the nearer term, increased acceptance of housing as a public health issue will be catalyzed by changes to medical school curriculum that involve emphasis on housing as a social determinant of health and the restructuring of Medicaid to allow for healthy housing prescriptions. The prioritization of healthy housing will in turn shape community integration efforts, because the health benefits of one’s housing spills over into affinity for one’s neighborhood and the communities they create. Most importantly, our interventions are structured to destigmatize economically affordable housing options such as subsidized dwellings, resource sharing, and co-living arrangements. An Instagram campaign led by diverse social media influencers would change the way people think about what it means to live affordably. This campaign is simultaneously informed by the medical establishment’s emphasis on healthy housing and shaped by the innovative housing solutions coming out of the collaborations between developers and those marketing 3D printed housing solutions. The aesthetics of innovative design makes for compelling Instagram content, which successfully fuels the campaign over the long term to change dominant attitudes.
Narratives Created and Changed
With the goal of systemic change in mind, our solutions were deeply influenced by Donella Meadows’ 1999 masterwork, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. While it would be more than possible to identify interventions acting upon each of Meadows’ 12 leverage points, we were particularly fascinated by the second-most-powerful point: “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.”
And although stocks and flows of housing are clearly important to the economics of housing, feedback loops abound. We identified early on that a successful intervention in this wicked problem would require more than putting more roofs over heads. To make the kind of change we envisioned necessitated intervention at the higher leverage point — changing the thoughts and mindsets out of which the problem arises.
In the system of affordable housing, beneficiaries are subjected to persistent stigma. Whether at the individual level, where derogatory terms like “welfare queen” or “drain on society” are recklessly dispensed, or at the systemic level, where NIMBY opposition blocks the creation of new housing capacity, stigma is a core component of the affordable housing experience. This stigma has no place In the positive experience of housing we sought to bring about. Instead, we saw the necessity of changing the mindset and paradigm out of which these negative associations arose.
Each of the three emergent outcomes described above connect to the broader leverage point of eliminating stigma and shifting mindsets. As housing moves towards being accepted as a public health issue, we imagine a world in which receiving affordable housing is as stigma-free as a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy. Popularizing subsidized dwellings, resource sharing, and co-living through public awareness and social media campaigns could further shift the narrative. And as more and more dwellings become affordable and supported by policy initiatives, more people could shift from othering those taking advantage of affordable housing to treating them like the neighbors they truly are.
Based on our past research, we have found that social stigmatization of affordable housing is based on a set of negative narratives of injustice. For example, affordable housing is deemed inferior to single family housing, or affordable housing has a bad impact on the community through the risk of higher crime rates and lower housing prices. Leaving aside the fact that these unjust views stem from deeper and higher levels of discrimination, oppression, inequality, such narratives are repeatedly reinforced in social contexts that actually lead to less valued, poorer quality, and more isolated affordable housing. The synergy of our intervention strategies aims to break such old narratives.
On one hand, our interventions are aimed at improving the quality of affordable housing, while on the other hand, we use a series of social activities to link affordable housing with an environmentally harmonious lifestyle. Exposure on social media is a cost effective and accessible tool, and the dissemination of images and videos allows people to see for themselves. The experience of living in popularized sustainable housing drives people to actually learn about affordable housing and the people who live there. The stigma caused by lack of understanding, ignorance or stereotypes will be greatly reduced.
Concluding Thoughts
In just a few months, our team has come a long way from the initial mapping of our wicked problem to outlining system level interventions. The process unveiled one future consideration and three main takeaways.
We would also like to acknowledge one major limitation to our process. Most of our analysis and interventions are based on secondary research and are thus speculative. Limitations stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic restricted our ability engage with stakeholders and conduct primary research to better understand the domain as well as assess the perception about the wicked problem by impacted individuals. To that end, our team would have liked to engage in an intensive co-design process with these stakeholders for future directions. We would need to interview and talk to the stakeholders to identify pressing issues which could re-prioritize the sequence in which these interventions are implemented or if at all based on if these innovative interventions were truly beneficial. For example, the Community Integration Program was adapted from an existing model of an integration program for disadvantaged youth transitioning into adulthood. The current designing for system intervention is still developed at a higher level and by talking to stakeholders, we would need to discuss not only whether this intervention is beneficial but how it will be implemented step-wise.
One surprise from Assignment #5 was the level of strategic thinking our team had to engage in. While our final matrix proposed ten interventions, we developed many more potential concepts to combat lack of affordable housing. Revisiting the goal to develop system-level change, however, we had to be intentional about the conglomerate of interventions pieced together and consider many factors. How realistically can these interventions be implemented today? Which ones create the most synergistic effects? During this process, empathetic thinking in the shoes of policy makers and city officials allowed us to assess which interventions were feasible as well as how our impacted stakeholders, the single household mothers and private developers, would buy-in.
Another major takeaway during this assignment and in general within Transition Design was going beyond materialistic to non-tangible interventions, mainly culture and perceptions, and recognizing the power of narratives. This seed was planted during our STEEP and stakeholder analysis but really sprouted during Assignment #3, mapping the historical evolution of lack of affordable housing and using the multi-level perspective framework. Following the problem and solution space through narrative helped make the analysis and intervention more multifaceted. It also helped us draw from different disciplines to better understand how the narratives influence the core of the problem and how to dismantle or build upon it.
Our final takeaway was the power of future visioning. Despite initial reservations about Assignment #4, future visioning made the development of these interconnected interventions possible. The process pushed us to think beyond the current system and move away from capitalism and widen our possibilities to mutual aid, pluriversality, and localism, pushing for true innovation. This assignment helped manifest some of the ideas into a more tangible future pathway. It required a fine balancing act of keeping the future vision in mind while identifying current initiatives and analytically assessing the leverage points for feasibility.
