Yes in my Backyard
For the architect Anne Torney ’83, helping address the Bay Area’s housing crisis over the past several decades has been both challenging and immensely rewarding.
Story by Sarah Abrams
Photographs by Winni Wintermeyer
The San Francisco architect Anne Torney ’83 enjoys discussing why she’s so passionate about her work as an architect of urban affordable housing. Its design, she says, offers the potential to address two of the most important issues of our time: social inequity and climate change.
One of three managing partners at Mithun, a 200-person architecture firm with offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Torney heads up the San Francisco office, where she leads a 40-person team of architects, landscape architects, planners, and interior designers.
Over the course of her career, Torney has been working to right the wrongs of decades of neglect in meeting the housing needs of Bay Area residents. Resistance to new development and lack of funding have resulted in a dramatic lack of affordable-housing construction over the years. Those with the least resources are impacted the most.
“The consequences have been staggering for many of the area’s residents, who have been struggling for decades with soaring housing costs,” Torney says. “People want to be housed. We have thwarted that ability and we have thwarted people’s ability to thrive.”
The average home in San Francisco today costs more than $1.4 million, and nearly half—45 per- cent—of Bay Area renters are rent burdened. “It’s not affordable for folks of most incomes,” she says, “but the real crisis is for people at the very low end of the income scale who fall out of housing and become homeless. More than 160,000 Californians are unhoused, and 38,000 people in the Bay Area are experiencing homelessness.”
Currently, affordable housing provides relief to only a fraction of the area’s residents, who compete in a lottery system for the city’s few available subsidized units. “It’s highly, highly competitive,” Torney says. “This is a crisis that is completely of our own doing, and the scale of the challenge is epic. We have under-built for decades, and it is going to take years for us to get out of it.”
Over the past several decades, through high-quality, thoughtfully conceived design, Torney has been demonstrating how affordable housing provides “layers and layers of benefits” to a community. From the revitalization of isolated public housing into a 16-block mixed-income neighborhood to a small in-fill project for seniors experiencing homelessness, the projects are significant not only for the housing they provide a community, she says, but also for the economic, cultural, and ecological infrastructure they offer. “We think of housing as a commodity, but it is so much more,” Torney says. “It provides infrastructure in the same way that bridges, tunnels, and roads provide important services to a community. It provides a strong economic infrastructure by locating housing closer to transit and jobs, a cultural infrastructure by preventing displacement and providing space for public art and cultural institutions, and finally, an ecological infrastructure by designing sustainably conscious buildings that support community health and wellness. Many of our recent buildings are fossil-fuel free, make use of renewable energy, and forgo parking, all of which help move our culture toward a low-carbon way of living.”
Mithun’s Casa Adelante 2060 Folsom housing project, which last year received the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Award, exemplifies how mixed-use developments benefit a community. The 127-unit, mid-rise building, which overlooks a city park and community garden in the city’s Mission District, provides community services, is transit-accessible, and almost 80 percent more energy-efficient than comparable housing. All units are reserved for low- and very-low-income households, and 27 percent of the units are designated for youths aging out of foster care.
At Kapuso at the Upper Yard, completed in 2023, underutilized land at a busy transit hub was trans- formed into a 130-unit apartment building with a new landscaped plaza that serves residents, commuters, and the wider community. The building’s ground floor includes a child- care center, a youth arts program, a bike-share center, and space for a locally owned cafe. Most residents are employed but make no more than 60 percent of the area median wage; regardless, rent is capped at 30 percent of their income.
“That’s the joy of being an affordable-housing architect in San Francisco,” Torney says about the work she does. “You have the opportunity to design really beautiful neighborhood-serving buildings. Well-designed affordable housing can enhance neighborhoods and bring up property values, and are also regionally serving. Kapuso is helping encourage transit ridership, because what was once a kind of windswept no-man’s-land is now an active community hub with public art, neighborhood amenities, and childcare. We’ve made it more comfortable, safe, and fun for people to take transit.”
Torney’s love for drawing and literature—subjects that would prove foundational to her future career— began at Milton, she says. Living on campus, including in Wolcott House as a young child, she attended Mil- ton from kindergarten through graduation. Her parents, Joan and Johnston Torney ’37 taught at Milton, her mother in the Lower School and her father as a Latin and English literature teacher in the Upper School. He also served for several years as the Upper School principal of the Boys School and in 1992 was awarded the Milton Medal in recognition of his extraordinary service to the school. Her brother, Ian Torney ’82, was for many years chair of Milton’s Visual Arts Department and continues to serve on the faculty and as executive director of the school’s Nesto Gallery.
It was in an introductory course at Princeton that Torney discovered her love for architecture. From the start, she enjoyed the collaborative process—how students worked together in studios brainstorming and sharing ideas. “It’s actually how architecture happens in real life,” she says. “The experience in the studio prepares you for designing and get- ting a building approved and con- structed. You never work alone, but always in collaboration with many, many others: colleagues, interdisciplinary design teams, clients, city staff, and community members.” After college, Torney headed to San Francisco, where the direction of her career began to take shape. She spent several years at the architectural firm David Baker Architects before enrolling in a master’s program at UC Berkeley where she met Professor Daniel Solomon, an architect and leading exponent of new urbanism, who became her mentor. Soon Torney began working for Solomon at Daniel Solomon Design Partners, where she quickly rose to become a partner. In 2012, the firm joined forces with Mithun, an integrated design firm highly focused on sustainability. AIA recently awarded Mithun its 2023 Architecture Firm Award for “its holistic, interdisciplinary pursuit of architecture.” In addition to being one of Mithun’s three managing partners, Torney sits on its board of directors.
Torney’s appreciation for collaboration has been critically important to the work she does. Guiding an affordable-housing project through the design process and ensuring that the design helps win funding is complex. “It involves multi-agency coordination and political forces coming together,” she says, “and designing housing and public space that support and invigorate each other, so the project is serving the broader neighborhood.”
Over the years, Torney has seen an appreciable change in the number of groups involved and issues raised in the process. “It used to be that community engagement meant homeowner engagement—the people concerned about the impact on their property values of bigger, dens- er buildings or people of different backgrounds living in their neighborhood,” she says. “We make sure to engage the full range of stakeholders and a wide array of perspectives, especially neighborhood advocates and those who represent income groups and racial groups that have been systematically marginalized and are often those who are most impacted by the extreme cost burden of housing.”
Torney is encouraged by the broader recognition that the need for affordable housing is now receiving. “The perception around affordable housing is slowly changing,” she says. “Folks are beginning to realize that it’s hypocritical to consider yourself a champion for social equity and the environment, yet oppose dense, well-located, transit-oriented, affordable housing. It’s still an epic challenge, but we’re re- ally starting to align around it,” she says. The “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) voices persist, she says, but the voices saying, “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) are gaining greater traction and political power.
Today, Torney says, the greatest hurdle to addressing the housing crisis is adequate funding to meet the overwhelming need. Currently in the Bay Area, more than 40,000 approved affordable units are unable to proceed to construction because of a lack of funding. “By state law, San Francisco is required to build 82,000 additional homes by 2030,” Torney says. “We will have to be building homes at two or three times the rate that we have in years past to achieve this goal.”
Over the years, Torney has earned the respect of both her community and architectural peers for her contributions in making the Bay Area a place where residents of diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds can afford to live. In 2018, she was inducted into the Wm. S. Marvin Hall of Fame for Design Excellence for her “contributions to residential architecture and affordable housing.”
In addition to her work at Mithun, Torney sits on the board of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition—a group providing statewide political support for key affordable-housing legislation. She also finds time to help educate the broader community when she can, writing opinion pieces for leading newspapers on zoning regulations, leading walking tours to show the advantages of affordable housing to the city’s residents, and speaking at conferences across the country.
Torney believes that timing has played an important role in her career. Finding her calling when she did, she says, coincided with a time when cities were starting to broaden their vision for how to create and expand affordable housing. “San Francisco was beginning to under- stand the importance of high-quality design as critical to affordable housing,” she says. “City officials understood investing in affordable housing as part of a strategy to make neighborhoods that are not only beautiful, but also equitable and highly just. I was very lucky to be an architect in that environment.”
And while there is so much still to be done, the progress she has witnessed over the years has been gratifying. In an article for Women in Architecture, Torney explained what it means to see people enjoying their new homes: “People moving into our housing and playing in our open spaces, I’m moved by what a difference it makes in people’s lives to live in safe, stable housing that’s as beautiful as any in the city.”