When Good Enough Is Better

An unfinished basement is a peculiar feature to advertise in a new house. The concrete floor is exposed, the walls are bare, and plumbing pipes may emerge from the floor without a sink or toilet anywhere nearby.

Yet for many homeowners, that unfinished space is an advantage.

The builder has already completed the expensive, difficult work. The foundation is in place, the plumbing is routed, and the house above is ready to occupy. Finishing the basement can wait until the family needs more room or has the money to afford it. The homeowner gets a functioning house today without paying for every possible use of the space tomorrow.

It is a familiar approach in residential construction, but the underlying idea has appeared in some surprisingly different places.

In the Chilean city of Iquique, architects faced a difficult housing problem. Ninety-three families had been living in an informal settlement on increasingly valuable urban land. A government subsidy could keep them in that location, but it could not buy the complete homes the families would eventually need.

Moving the families to cheaper land on the outskirts would have disrupted their connections to jobs, schools, and neighbors. Building tiny finished homes on the existing site would have consumed the available funding without providing a practical way for those homes to grow.

The architectural firm ELEMENTAL proposed something unusual: build half of a good house.

The Quinta Monroy development gave each family about 36 square meters of initial living space. The homes included essential structural elements, utilities, kitchens, bathrooms, and deliberately reserved spaces for future expansion.

Families could move in immediately, then add rooms as their needs and resources changed. A study twelve years later found that 92 of the 93 households had expanded or modified their homes.

The value was in deciding what to build first. Instead of spending the entire subsidy on a small, conventionally finished house, the architects invested in infrastructure that would have been expensive or difficult for residents to add later. The remaining work could happen incrementally, guided by the people who would live there.

Software developers may recognize a version of this thinking.

In software development, a minimum viable product is an early version built to be useful enough to test important assumptions. Instead of spending years building every imagined feature, developers release something functional, observe how people use it, and improve it through successive iterations.

Sometimes the greatest value of a functioning first version is what it reveals about the version that should follow.

In 2009, New York City wanted to improve pedestrian safety and traffic movement around Times Square. Permanently rebuilding one of the world’s busiest intersections would have been expensive, disruptive, and difficult to reverse.

The city temporarily closed portions of Broadway to vehicles and turned the roadway into pedestrian plazas using temporary materials, tables, and beach chairs.

The result was hardly an architectural masterpiece. It was, however, a working public space.

People could walk through it, sit in it, and discover how the redesigned streets felt. Transportation officials could measure its effects on traffic and pedestrian safety.

The pilot produced encouraging results, including improved taxi speeds across West Midtown and fewer pedestrian injuries in the project area. In 2010, the city decided to make the changes permanent.

The inexpensive first version had done something that drawings, public meetings, and traffic simulations could not accomplish on their own. It allowed people to experience the proposed change while the city gathered evidence about how it actually worked.

In Oregon, environmental restoration practitioners have taken an even more unusual approach.

Along Bridge Creek, a tributary in the John Day River basin, years of erosion had left portions of the stream deeply incised and disconnected from the surrounding floodplain. Restoring the system through conventional engineering would have been a substantial undertaking.

Researchers instead installed simple structures known as beaver dam analogues. Made from wooden posts and branches, the artificial dams slowed water, trapped sediment, and created conditions in which natural stream processes could recover. They also encouraged existing beavers to build and maintain dams of their own.

The results were substantial. The number of dams increased, stream habitats became more complex, and researchers documented significant improvements in the density, survival, and production of juvenile steelhead trout.

Bridge Creek pushes the idea furthest. The human-built structures were never meant to become the finished stream. They only had to slow enough water, catch enough sediment, and create enough stability for vegetation and beavers to continue the work.

They were good enough to let the river take over.