Bringing the Power of Design to Affordable Housing: The History and Evolution of the Affordable Housing Design Advisor

Deane Evans
New Jersey Institute of Technology Center for Building Knowledge

The Affordable Housing Design Advisor (Design Advisor) is an online capacity-building tool designed to help developers, sponsors, and users of affordable housing understand what constitutes good-quality design, why it is worth striving for, and how to achieve it in their own projects. The Design Advisor was created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and launched in 2001. This article describes the history and evolution of the Design Advisor through the intervening years, ending with the upgrading and relaunch of the tool in 2013.