One of the most interesting things I heard at a recent multifamily conference had nothing to do with finishes, amenities or what a building looked like. It was how the residents’ questions changed after they had a stable place to live.
I recently moderated a case studies panel at IMN’s Middle-Market Multifamily conference in the Pacific Northwest. We covered two very different topics, affordable housing and AI, but one part of the affordable-housing conversation has stayed with me.
Cathy Reines of Kōz Development shared an observation from KOZ @ Alderwood, a multifamily development in Lynnwood, Washington. She described how the questions residents were asking changed over time. Initially, the conversation centered on housing stability. Later, residents wanted more knowledge about money and finances. Eventually, Cathy heard interest in learning how to start businesses.
That progression sent my designer brain somewhere else. It brought me back to ontological design. We don’t just design spaces. Spaces design us back.
Design creates conditions, not outcomes
I want to be careful with that idea because it’s easy to give design too much credit. A building doesn’t make someone financially secure or cause them to start a business. Housing stability, education, opportunity and countless other factors shape what happens in someone’s life.
What interested me about Cathy’s story was the progression. Once one fundamental need became more stable, people had room to think about something else. The environments we create become part of those conditions. They influence how people move, where they gather, whether they have privacy and what kinds of activities the space supports. They shape what’s possible without controlling behavior.
The practical side of a philosophical idea
Ontological design can sound academic. In my work, it’s very practical. I see it when residents consistently use one part of a clubhouse and ignore another. I see it when a space technically accommodates several activities but doesn’t allow them to happen comfortably at the same time.
This is one reason commercial design has always suited the way I think. I love the creative side, but I can’t separate it from function, budgets, maintenance and operations. I want to understand the person who will use the space and the people who will run it, because eventually every design decision has to work in real life.
Constraints don’t remove the responsibility to design well
The affordable-housing conversation puts this principle into particularly sharp focus because the economic constraints are real. Financing, development costs and operating realities shape every choice. Design doesn’t get to ignore any of that, and the answer cannot simply be to prescribe an ideal environment regardless of what the project can support.
The more interesting design work happens inside those constraints. When everything can’t receive equal priority, where does privacy matter most? Where does the environment need to support interaction? Replace with: Which shared spaces are most important to how residents actually live, and which are lower priorities when the budget requires tradeoffs?
Those decisions look different from one property to another. The resident matters. So do the architecture, operating model, market and available capital. That’s why I’m wary of treating “affordable housing” as though it automatically tells us what the design response should be. It tells us something important about the development model and its constraints. It doesn’t tell us everything about the people who will live there.
People have a way of correcting our assumptions
One part of Cathy’s panel discussion that mattered to me was the fact that Kōz kept asking residents what they needed. Designers can get very good at imagining how people should use the environments we create. Then people move in and show us what actually works for them.
I’ve seen residents gravitate toward a smaller room while a larger space gets very little use. We’ve redesigned multifamily clubhouses after learning that different activities needed clearer separation. That’s information about how people actually use a space.
The onsite team brings another layer of that information because they live with the property every day. Asset management brings the larger vision for where the property is headed. A commercial designer’s job is to listen to those perspectives and translate them into decisions about programming, circulation, materials and durability, the details that eventually become someone’s daily environment.
The project isn’t really finished when we photograph it
There’s something funny about the way we document design projects. We photograph them at exactly the moment when we have the most control, before anyone has decided a chair works better six feet from where we specified it.
Then real life starts. People establish routines. They find favorite places, avoid others, move things around. Property teams maintain, repair and adapt what we selected. The environment becomes theirs rather than ours.
That’s the part of design I find increasingly interesting, because it keeps the designer’s role in perspective. We can create conditions that support privacy, connection, dignity or independence. We can decide, with real precision, how a space supports the people using it. But we don’t get to dictate what happens next.
Room to do what’s next
That’s why Cathy’s comments stayed with me after the conference. A building didn’t cause the progression she described. What stayed with me was the question of what happens when the conditions surrounding someone change enough that their questions can change too.
As designers, we spend a lot of time asking what a space needs to contain and how it needs to function. How it should feel matters just as much, but it’s harder to plan for. Those decisions are the work. Cathy’s story left me with another question, though. Once we’ve addressed the immediate need, the harder question is what the environment gives someone room to do next.
Design won’t answer that question by itself. Understanding how the environments we create shape what happens next is part of the job.
If you’re planning a multifamily or other commercial environment, bring the people who will use and operate the space into the conversation early. Those perspectives can change what deserves priority long before you start selecting finishes and furnishings.
