How affordable should San Francisco’s affordable housing be? Home sweet Home targets San Francisco’s most vulnerable population, offering a home for those expelled from the formal housing system, by defining new ways of inhabiting the existing citythat understand sharing as a basic principle to enable affordable ways of living.

San Francisco, one of US most prosperous areas, is home to an increasingly large houselesspopulation. In a time when home has become our strongest protection, the right to a home should become a basic principle in the configuration of our cities.

Home sweet Home is a metropolitan strategy that turns the obsolete underpasses of San Francisco’s highways into active living environments. As opposed to the city’s temporary homeless shelters, Home sweet Home offers a permanent home to whoever wants to inhabit it. Inhabiting, in this sense, means to participate in building and to engage with its communal way of life. The proposal identifies four living spheres, each associated with different degrees of sharing: being (individual scale), caring (family scale), sharing (cluster), coliving (community) and coexisting (neighborhood).

Its architectural manifestations constitute flexible living structures that reshape and reinvent themselves through the activities of its inhabitants. The main components of this living organism are the Infrastructural Walls, where the domestic infrastructure is located, the Programmatic Platforms, where shared domesticities take place, and the Plug-In Rooms, the minimum domestic space. The combination of these elements constitutes a flexible platform for the exploration of innovative ways of inhabiting and transforming the existing city.