Ashburn Station is a new community promoted as the "most luxurious choice for luxury living" in Loudoun County, Virginia. Within walking distance from the county's first metro rail station, Ashburn Station has townhouse-style condos with amenities such as gourmet kitchens, walk-in closets, rooftop terraces, tot lots, nearby retail, and restaurants. These "amenities" are also essential for sustainable, affordable housing communities.
Kudos to the marketing teams selling market-rate housing. They need to make new construction housing sound like resort-style living, an investment worth making. So, they list home and community features as amenities, even luxuries. These so-called amenities matter in affordable housing.
Urban Campus & Core CEO Jennifer Horne believes features considered amenities are often necessities for creating communities with long-term viability.
"We provide opportunities for nontraditional partners to benefit from the positive economic returns from projects," said Horne. "We blend affordable and market units so residents from a variety of income levels can benefit from wellness-focused building design and amenities. Our investment partners benefit from market-rate returns while leaving a measurable social and environmental impact."
Why Amenities Matter in Affordable Housing?
Amenities support comfort, health, education, community, and economic mobility. Research supports the value of providing these amenities in affordable housing projects and rejecting the stigma of affordability as an entitlement.
According to a World Green Building Council report, sustainable development goals emphasize adequate housing as more than shelter—it includes access to services, safety, and community infrastructure.
A North Dakota State infographic illustrates the best and most efficient ways to "design affordable housing in a way that is most cost-effective while providing the residents with the elements that they need to prosper." The infographic breaks amenities down into home and community features.
Home Features Promoted as Amenities are Essential
With more home searches beginning online, how affordable housing amenities are presented matters as much to moderate-income people as to the affluent. Whether a person is a multimillionaire searching for a gourmet kitchen with high-end appliances or a moderate-income family seeking a washer and dryer in the unit. Families want homes that foster quality of life.
Builders often feature energy-efficient appliances as amenities, especially in kitchen design. These amenities reduce utility costs and support environmental sustainability. Who needs reduced utility costs more than people in affordable housing?
Cost-saving air conditioning and heating controls, accessible design, durability, and safety are also listed as amenities. Yet they offer structural resilience, a necessity for sustainability.
Ashburn Meadows, an income-restricted affordable housing development, is not far from Ashburn Station. The description of Ashburn Meadows—idyllic setting near some of the area's best schools and employment opportunities; a host of recreational amenities, the Washington & Old Dominion trail, several lakes, and miles of community hiking and biking pathways; as well as plentiful shopping and dining options—makes the community sound as luxurious as Ashburn Station.
Townhomes and lofts, starting at $500,000, can coexist with income-restricted apartments. The people who rent an apartment in Ashburn Meadows work in the same area as those who will move into Ashburn Station. Their kids will attend the same area schools and play on the same youth sports teams.
Community Features: Building Sustainable Neighborhoods
A sustainable community where kids feel safe should not be promoted as a luxury in a wealthy nation. But it often is.
Community rooms and remote working spaces foster social ties and entrepreneurial engagement. Community spaces for after-school programs, cultural and recreational pursuits add to a community's well-being, which is the goal of affordable housing and gated communities.
According to HUD, career services, community events, outdoor spaces, social and mental health services, and after-school programs are the Top five amenities for affordable housing communities.
Access to Public Transportation: Amenity and Necessity
The metro station in Ashburn was a long time in the making. Forty years ago, Ashburn was best known as the training location for the NFL's Washington D.C. football team. Back then, Ashburn was borderline rural.
Then, in the mid-1990s, big tech moved into town, and so did the minivan caravans, and gated communities with golf courses. Now, a major suburb of Washington, D.C., Ashburn is home to one of the most educated and affluent populations in the nation. Still, these tech workers, politicians, and K-street attorneys begged for relief from two-hour commutes on congested toll roads.
The Ashburn metro station opened in 2022. Access to public transit is essential to sustainable communities, even for the affluent. But more so for those in affordable housing. Reliable transportation enables access to jobs, education, services, and economic mobility.
In a Habitat for Humanity report on “Housing and Sustainable Development Goals,” states that:
"Adequate housing means more than a roof over one's head. It also means adequate privacy; adequate space; physical accessibility; adequate security; security of tenure; structural stability and durability; adequate lighting, heating and ventilation; adequate basic infrastructure, such as water-supply, sanitation and waste management facilities; suitable environmental quality and health related factors; and adequate and accessible location with regard to work and basic facilities: all of which should be available at an affordable cost."
Who Benefits from "Amenities" in Affordable Housing?
Contrary to the stigma sometimes attached to people who live in subsidized housing, those living in affordable housing are integral to communities.
"Affordable housing is sometimes referred to as 'workforce housing." This is because affordable housing serves the needs of people employed in the jobs that we rely upon to make every community viable. These people include teachers, teacher's aides, nursing assistants, medical technologists, retail workers, government employees, emergency services providers, and law enforcement.
"These are some of the low- and very low-income members of your community," according to a report on affordable housing from the Florida Housing Coalition.
That report noted that "a person working a minimum wage job in Florida earns approximately $16,848 per year, assuming they work 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, and 10 percent of Florida's elderly live at or below the poverty level."
The study included examples of affordable housing communities with amenities such as access to shopping, transportation, and recreational spaces. One example is Tampa's Trio, part of the Encore Development. The Trio consists of one 6-story and two 4-story buildings with 141 units of one, two, three, and four-bedroom floor plans that are rented at market rates and subsidized rates based on the tenants' incomes.
The mixed-income development also has a state-of-the-art fitness center, media theater, internet café, lobby art gallery, game room, and pool. Residents are within walking distance of Tampa's waterfront and vibrant Ybor City shopping district.
Another example is Urban Campus & Core’s Northview housing project. Upon completion, the 254-unit affordable housing project for seniors in Nashville will offer residents a fitness center promoting physical wellness, a rooftop deck for community gathering, walking trails and recreational spaces, on-site job skills training, social programming to encourage community engagement and health and wellness services through a partnership with Tennessee State University.
People who dwell in affordable housing contribute to society, and more developers and government officials are designing projects with amenities. Developers and policymakers recognize that features like the ones at Trio are necessities, not luxuries, for sustainable, equitable communities.