Learning from A Shotgun House

On my first long weekend trip to New Orleans, I stayed in a refurbished shotgun house. From the street, it looked like a dollhouse, with a very narrow porch and tall shuttered windows. The owners kept the existing rooms and added a long corridor from front to back, so you could see right through to the backyard. I enjoyed it, and I kept thinking about what made a place seem like home.

What exactly is a shotgun house?

The name comes from an old joke: fire a shotgun through the front door, and the shot comes out the back without hitting a wall as the doors are aligned on plan. The houses are extremely narrow, about 3.5m wide. New Orleans built thousands of them from the 1840s through the 1920s for working-class families, freed people, and immigrants.

What impressed me most was just how cool the house was. Open the front and back doors, and a breeze flows through every room. The high ceilings let warm air rise. A typical shotgun house sits on brick piers a few feet off the ground. In a low-lying city that floods all the time, that gap keeps water under the floor instead of in the living room.

New York’s crowded counterpart

New York has its own version: the railroad apartment, where rooms run front to back like the railroad cars in Manhattan tenements of the late 1800s.

Same concept, very different result. The shotgun house stands alone, with windows on either side. The railroad apartment sat between buildings, so its central rooms often had no windows at all. The families that lived there were in very dark, damp and overcrowded conditions and tuberculosis was rife. A massive public outcry led to the Tenement House Act of 1901, which required a window in every room.

What this could mean for the Philippines

Think of Metro Manila in a downpour. Within an hour, the streets become rivers, and the esteros meant to drain them are full of garbage or filled in. Anyone who went through “Ondoy” in 2009 will tell you about families literally stranded on rooftops. New Orleans learned to live with water by lifting their homes. We keep building ours flat on the ground as if the water’s never going to come.

Subdivisions are built on floodplains, with concrete boxes poured onto the ground and compacted so tightly there’s virtually no air in them. Informal settlements line the riverbanks, because that’s the only land close to work. The government relocation sites are often many hours outside the city, so you end up losing your livelihood, and people just quietly go back to the same dangerous places. A house without a city around it isn’t really a house.

The fixes aren’t complicated. Narrow homes can work because they use the land well (a row house is a very efficient use of land) and can be designed to grow as families save. The houses should breathe, with cross-ventilation, high ceilings, and a window in every room. They should be raised for the same reason that the shotgun house has piers and the bahay kubo has stilts (to keep the living space above water). As New York demonstrated in 1901, simple, enforceable standards can greatly affect how a whole city lives.

What we can learn

It never is about money or space. It was about whether the builders respected light, air, and water. New Orleans didn’t stop the rain; it built around the rain. Manila can, too, if we start thinking of every new home as part of the city, not just a box on a lot.