New Orleans architect and urban designer Jonathan Tate has thought a lot about the American dream and whether it is still meaningful. Tate, president of the Office of Jonathan Tate, created the Starter Home to put a modern spin on the notion of entry-level tract housing. His vision includes creating affordable housing on urban infill lots situated on overlooked or oddly shaped lots.

“It actually came about as a provocation from a colleague, now my partner in the endeavor, Charles Rutledge, about a year and a half ago,” Tate explains. “He was curious about the notion of an affordable entry-level home in an urban context and I was, at the time, ruminating over the lack of access and dreadful state of speculative housing in the historic core of our city.”

The first Starter Home was completed in 2015 in New Orleans’ Irish Channel neighborhood. The 975-square-foot home’s open design caters to first-time buyers in addition to families and emptynesters. Tate’s team has roughly 20 similar projects in the works.

Even though the project has garnered accolades from architects and designers across the country, Tate is not prepared to proclaim his vision a success. “With just one completed I think we’re still trying to prove it is successful,” he admits. “We’ve got a handful of new ones in construction or predevelopment now, so we’ll wait to claim that when these are completed and received in a similar light. That said, what makes it work is that it appears no one was thinking about this particular problem or possibility. Not that we’ve invented anything singularly new, just that we were able to combine a number of active concerns in a way that proved compelling.”

As with any project, there are challenges— the biggest in this case being access to available property, according to Tate. “Given the areas we were interested in, sites were few and far between, and we were competing in an aggressive market,” he says. “As we’ve moved forward with additional developments and into other cities, I would say the recurring issue is land acquisition.”