Urban design comes home to NE16
To say an old house has “good bones” means the most important elements are sound — foundation, infrastructure, layout, all wrapped in character — but there is room for improvement.
The idea can fit a neighborhood. A stretch of NE 16, an old city block in inner Oklahoma City, has good bones, basics like long-established water, electricity and natural gas, plus proximity to downtown, the state Capitol and OU Health Sciences Center. They're especially evident in its character, in physical features like big, mature trees and in the intangibles of its African-American heritage.
Jeff Click and Sandino Thompson are working on improvements, two new houses at a time. Click's edgy urban designs are going into an infill redevelopment they call “NE16,” in what historically is Bath Second East View addition, platted in 1911. Thompson's Community Impact Development and Click's Jeff Click Design Build are collaborating on the Urban Renewal project.
NE 16 between N Missouri and N Kelham avenues, two blocks west of Martin Luther King Avenue, is far from Click's usual work in northwest Oklahoma City-Edmond-Deer Creek. He was content to keep it that way, staying busy in his comfort zone even as homebuyers helping drive the renaissance of downtown and the urban core called on him to bring his design style home where it belonged, to the inner city.
Over time, he started to see homebuilding as a way not only to create community, as in a new addition, but also as a way to help restore life to an old one. He met Thompson through a close mutual friend.
“Aside from just really resonating with him on many levels, we particularly connected on the topic of development and its impact on community, something he has both passion towards and professional experience in,” Click said. “Our paths continued to cross in what I would call `providential ways,' and eventually he asked me if I'd be interested in (considering what became NE16).”
Click said his involvement with the city's 2015 comprehensive planning guide, planOKC, and Carlton Landing, a new town started from scratch 10 years ago on Lake Eufaula by Oklahoma City's Humphreys Co., opened his eyes to “other interesting and impactful ways to shape lives and communities through home building.”
“Those experiences awakened a new perspective on how to approach design and its effect on how we live,” Click said. “As I enter my third decade as a builder, I feel drawn to opportunities with greater significance than the status quo. Sandino's vision and passion for the revitalization of an area of town that, admittedly, I wasn't readily familiar with, was contagious, and I wanted in.”
Re-creating thriving community
Click plans to build up to eight houses ranging in size from 1,500 to 2,000 square feet, and in price from $200,000 to $300,000, in an old neighborhood pockmarked by empty lots where old houses finally gave way to wear, tear and time. Which raises a complicated, if not delicate, question: What about gentrification?
“The word `gentrification' is an interesting one since at its definition at its core is about wealth and privilege,” Thompson said. “Often when people use the word, however, it's a proxy for race and the idea of people moving into an area from somewhere else and then displacing those who are there. I am not saying that does not happen, in fact too often in the past this was exactly what took place as a means to disenfranchise families like mine. This partnership and this particular development is a very intentional attempt to do something quite different than displacement.”
Thompson said developing
Jeff Click
mixed-income neighborhoods to provide stability is the first step toward creating — or re-creating — thriving communities.
“This area does have its pockets of poverty, in large part due to intentionally racist policies of the past and the subsequent upward mobility of upper-income African Americans as state-sponsored segregating policies were dismantled during the civil rights movement,” he said. “We often hear about white flight to the suburbs, but for many reasons that was followed by wealth flight during desegregation. People like me have seen the impact of this and consider it a mistake.
“I want to see neighborhoods return to the vibrancy of the past when you had pensioners, cashiers, doctors, teachers and mechanics all living in the same area. I am not sure how to do that without creating spaces for lowerincome, middle-income and upper-income families in proximity to each other.
“It is critical that affordable housing not be a proxy for lowquality housing or for continuing to reinforce high concentrations of poverty that make it difficult to own a home and generate wealth for families. This project is a part of a larger effort on the northeast side to bring investment back into the community from people connected to it or from it, similar to the family that bought our first home.”
Joe and Audrey Daniels did confirm the viability of that vision. They were more than ready.
“For over 10 years,” Click said, “every year during the Parade of Homes, or any time I opened up a new furnished model home, I could always count on a visit from a magnetic guy by the name of Joe Daniels. He'd walk in, smile big at what he saw, and come straight to me and give me a bro hug. We'd catch up, and every time as he left, he'd end with `If you ever decide to come build on the east side, look me up. I'll be your first client.'
“When Joe and his wife, Audrey, learned we were a go on NE16, we met to review the designs I was building. We made a few modifications to one of the floor plans to suit their needs, and we collaborated over the next several months on a brand-new home in a neighborhood he was from. That story will be remembered easily as one of my career favorites.”
The risk of building in an old part of the city, and facing new unknowns, is the risk of business, Click said. That's why he goes light on speculative construction and relies most on custom building. More perplexing are the contrasting challenges of building, and the perceptions of building, in the central city versus the suburbs.
“I struggle with what appears to be the winless dichotomy of if we build in the 'burbs, we're contributing to sprawl, but if we come build in-fill, we are gentrifying,” Click said. “Where I come out is to simply aim to be as good a steward of the opportunity as I can. In order for this to work, the homes need to be as affordable as possible, but they still need to be viably profitable to build.
“Practically speaking in the case of NE16, I've taken the advantages of having been a small-volume suburban builder and applied them to what I consider a more boutique product. This includes leveraging buying power, a well-curated team of trades, and the knowledge acquired over the years on how and where to apply the right value to create an appropriately and thoughtfully built product. These homes are substantially less per square foot than most of my homes in Deer Creek and northwest OKC, but their energy performance is every bit as good. That contributes to the long-term affordability that goes beyond initial price tag.”