Stardust Center for
Affordable Homes and the Family

One of the first community issues brought to ASU president Michael Crow’s attention was affordable housing. From academic, pragmatic, social, and emotional perspectives, affordable homes present a host of challenges to low-income families. The issue cuts across academic disciplines, demanding attention from social workers, social scientists, policy wonks, architects, engineers, and sustainability gurus, to name a few.

With the input of the Stardust Foundation, we tried to conceptualize a center that would do three things: 1. provide solutions to these problems; 2. generate academic knowledge to help create those solutions; and 3. partner with community groups who could identify the needs, evaluate solutions, and be a driving force throughout the process.

Veronica Reed, a UI student who, as a Fulbright Scholar, was also a graduate student in building design, began to research other affordable housing initiatives across the country, the state of affordable housing in Arizona, and ASU’s capacity for research and delivery in the area. With this background information, input from the Stardust Foundation, guidance from the Associate Vice President for Economic Affairs Rob Melnick, and leadership from President Crow, UI put together a proposal for the ASU Stardust Center for Affordable Homes and the Family.

In the spring of 2003 ASU received a $2.5 million investment from the Stardust Foundation and immediately embarked upon two projects. First, we began a national search for an executive director for the center, eventually hiring Michael Pyatok in 2004. While the national search was taking place, we put together a workshop for ASU faculty from all disciplines about the potential for what the Stardust Center could become, generating interest and awareness.

Now, the ASU Stardust Center for Affordable Homes and the Family has fully come into being. It endeavors to look at homes in a comprehensive and qualitative way. The center has designed plans for thousands of affordable homes in the Valley, constructed two prototypes of sustainable affordable homes, and engages students as well as faculty in construction and design. It is now housed under the College of Design, in order to create a deeper bridge between the center’s efforts and ASU’s academic research in affordable housing.