Creating Affordable Housing Opportunities with Mass Timber

The dire shortage of affordable housing in the United States is unconscionable. The Housing Coalition’s 2020 annual report showed that rental rates are out of reach for nearly every worker in the bottom 50% of the national wage distribution (Aurand et al., 2020). With housing at the intersection of so many behaviors — social, financial, racial, political, and cultural — it is a critical problem to solve — the key to a just America. This paper briefly summarizes the history of both affordable housing and multifamily light frame construction, illustrates the challenges with affordable housing today, and presents 340+ Dixwell, a planned mass timber, passive house, affordable project in New Haven, Connecticut. The research summarized in this paper compared the 340+ Dixwell project to traditional light frames, illustrating that mass timber is a viable and appropriate solution for addressing affordable housing needs in the United States.