Affordable housing. The phrase seems plain enough, but it doesn’t always mean what people think it does. Affordable housing is a term the U.S. government uses to determine what gets built and who can live there.

The What Is Affordable Housing? guidebook uses pictures and diagrams to illustrate how affordable-housing policy operates in New York City. The book includes a compendium of New York’s affordable-housing programs and step-by-step instructions for using the toolkit to lead an affordable-housing workshop. The book and free PDF version are currently available in Spanish and English at envisioningdevelopment.net.

The cover of this book sparked a heated debate about design aesthetics vs. message clarity and communication. It seemed we all agreed that the interior was able to blend the two beautifully, but some of us were less convinced about the cover. In the end, we felt that the overall strength warranted its inclusion.

What is affordable housing? Exactly. This small two-color publication provoked controversy and contention over our notion of aesthetics and what makes an outstanding book. Its connection to the everyday tax-paying citizen offers insight and discourse to the subject of public housing and the dissemination of print materials in a time of distress over access and information overload. This is a design-appropriate functional tool.