Design

A well-designed home is about much more than appearance. It’s about lifting up resident voices, planning more equitable communities, and building better places to live.

Our national Design Initiative provides tools, programs, and research to support developers in mastering their design process to center the needs of residents and communities. We promote authentic community partnership to address years of racist development practices, which gave communities little agency in their future. We train developers how to focus their developments on outcomes that matter to residents — health, relationships, ownership, and pride — even when faced with budget constraints and short timelines. And we provide spaces for innovation in practice.

Here’s how we do it:

Provide field-tested resources, such as the Design Matters framework and toolkit, to guide developers through each step of the develop process. These resources prioritize resident voices and equitable outcomes, enabling the creation of breakthrough projects
Enhance developers’ design and construction capacity and leadership, through programs like the Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute (AHDLI), ensuring that developments foster residents' pride, power, and sense of belonging.
Deploy innovators to the field, through our Rose Fellowship program, to increase organizational capacity in the design process, authentic community engagement, and equity in the built environment.
Seed innovation in the field by testing and releasing tools and resources to generate new ideas and advance best practices.

Institute participants collaborate during the 2019 Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute

Featured Resource

Design Matters Toolkit

The Design Matters Toolkit provides three industry-tested tools that allow developers to incorporate thoughtful, people-focused design into any affordable housing project — no matter how tight the budget or complex the timeline. Get Started.

Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute

The Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute (AHDLI) provides affordable housing developers with the design tools, ideas, and relationships necessary to cut through complex financing and regulatory constraints to deliver homes that more deeply meet the needs and wants of residents and communities. The outcome is housing that not only provides a roof over its residents’ heads, but a home that can provide a steppingstone to more. It has never been more clear that the most important priority for affordable housing is to promote greater equity and healing of its residents from the decades of trauma and harm exerted by racist housing and financing systems. These are outcomes that can be designed for, with the proper training, tools, and leadership.

In the newly updated AHDLI curriculum, we explore how the design process can deliver equitable housing that is intended to heal. Developers learn and apply leading-edge predevelopment practices to a real project in their pipeline. In addition to gaining practical tools and project-specific feedback from national design experts, developers learn how to integrate equity and healing-centered approaches into their projects and daily operations.

At the Institute, it was nice to get away from the details and daily grind of making a project happen, and instead explore what an affordable housing development can mean not only to its residents, but the larger community.

2017 Developer Participant, Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute

Enterprise Rose Fellowship

The Rose Architectural Fellowship began in 2000 with the goal of improving the quality of design and development of affordable homes by integrating design skills and sustainability experience into the development process. To achieve this, the fellowship partners emerging professionals in architectural design with leaders in community development.

The program has evolved to meet the most pressing matters of the day, focusing on issues of racial inequity, resilience, and community power. Fellows' influence has extended beyond the architectural design process by deploying authentic community engagement. The addition of community-engaged artists into the fellowship allowed for an even deeper connection to community pride and belonging.

In 2020, Enterprise documented its 20-year history in Design with Love: At Home in America.

In 2022, the 19th cohort of Rose Fellows completed their fellowships. Over the years, 90 fellows, including 85 architects, four artists and one landscape architect, have worked alongside 103 partner organizations in 54 unique communities across 28 states in the country and Puerto Rico.

Rose Fellowship Alumni