A Texas Developer Attempts to Upend the American Subdivision

MINNIE J. CHAPA, a 75-year-old great-grandmother and proud renter of a nearly new, minimalist-style, three-bedroom home here, said old neighbors from Haskell Street, a stretch of cottages just east of downtown where she spent nearly 50 years, regularly ask her, “Do you live over there in the matchbox houses?”

To describe SOL Austin, the five-and-a-half-acre development in which Ms. Chapa resides, as “the matchbox houses” is both accurate and unfair.

Yes, the houses are small by American standards (they range from 1,030 to 1,816 square feet), and the architectural style is decidedly rectilinear. But the boxiness is mediated by the skyward tilt of butterfly roofs, angled to hold photovoltaic arrays and channel rainwater into barrels.

SOL, an acronym for Solutions Oriented Living, is an ambitious attempt to upend the conventions of the American subdivision. It was developed by a partnership between Chris Krager, a 43-year-old architect who heads a firm called KRDB, and Russell M. Becker, 47, a civil engineer and general manager and owner of Beck-Reit & Sons Ltd., a construction company.

The community is intended not just to be sustainable in its design and materials, but “net zero” — in other words, a housing development that would produce all the energy it consumed, with super-efficient homes outfitted with solar panels and geothermal wells. Moreover, this small development is also doing its part to take on the problems of economic and social injustice.

That it has been, so far, only partly successful in achieving these goals makes it no less interesting as a design experiment.

SOL is in East Austin, about three miles from downtown, an area designated African-American by a 1928 city plan. In 1962, the construction of I-35, a major north-south artery, further isolated the area’s population.

Over the last decade, however, those priced out of more-desirable neighborhoods to the south began to migrate east. The 2010 census showed a 40 percent increase in the area’s white population, while the number of minority residents dropped. During the same period, skyrocketing property taxes forced many longtime homeowners out.

Mr. Krager, who has a degree in business from Michigan State University and ran a Chicago mortgage brokerage before he became an architect, has made a practice of buying small pieces of property for which he designs and builds thoughtfully laid out modern homes, priced to appeal to young creative types who normally couldn’t afford an architect. Mainly, he’s done this in East Austin — which essentially makes him part of the problem.

“Ten years ago, we paid $15,000 for the first lots we built on in East Austin,” Mr. Krager said. “On that same street now, lots are $150,000.”

He began looking at land not just east of I-35, but farther out, east of a secondary highway, 183. When he found a live oak tree farm under the flight path of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, he and Mr. Becker bought it in 2007, for $700,000, and began work on a 40-house development.

“I figured that while we were at it, we might as well take all of our interests as a design firm and put them into one prototype project,” Mr. Krager said. He wanted to “examine sustainability on a more holistic level, that would not just look at green buildings, but in our interest in affordability, in the economic and social components of sustainability as well.”

As it happens, holistic sustainability proved harder to achieve than Mr. Krager and Mr. Becker anticipated. The pair spent six months doing their homework, pricing thermally efficient windows, foam insulation, Energy Star appliances and frugal heat pumps for heating and cooling.

Indeed, every house in SOL achieves the same high level of energy conservation: they were all designed to meet the federal Department of Energy’s guidelines for net-zero capable construction, which is to say, they use 55 percent less energy than a typical house (circa 2006). And all of them are constructed from a menu of materials (including low-V.O.C. paints that don’t contribute to air pollution and cabinets that don’t emit formaldehyde) widely regarded as green.